The pilot phase is over – AI grows up. Notes from the Enterprise AI Summit in Munich

For the past few months, we’ve been watching how companies approach AI shift in real time. Sii Poland’s team went to Munich for the Enterprise AI Summit to check their state of knowledge and get the new updates from AI field. The conference confirmed the direction in which the team had been heading in, but it also opened their eyes to things they hadn’t considered before.

No more pilots in a vacuum

For years, many companies ran AI projects on a trial basis – one here, another there, no coherent plan behind them. At the Enterprise AI Summit in Munich, it was clear that this phase is ending. Companies have started thinking bigger: instead of yet another pilot, they’re building platforms that let multiple solutions run side by side.

What’s interesting is that AI technology itself is becoming less of a differentiator. The models are available to everyone. What actually decides who wins is data and the ability to connect AI with existing systems. Companies that have their data in order and their integrations working smoothly are pulling ahead. Everyone else is still figuring it out.

“It’s a bit like what happened with the cloud a few years back – at first everyone experimented on their own, and then it turned out you’re better off with one coherent approach. It’s exactly the same with AI. In Munich, I saw companies that already get this and are building entire environments, not just individual tools.” – Marcin Mosiołek, Head of AI at Sii Poland

Your own AI, your own rules

The second topic that clearly gained momentum is sovereign AI platforms. In short, it’s about making sure a company, or a country isn’t entirely dependent on a single technology provider. This matters especially in regulated industries – finance, energy, defense – where control over data and models isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity.

The conversations went beyond regulation. People asked practical questions:

• How do you adapt models to a local language and context?
• What happens to your operations when a vendor changes their terms?

The topic is still fresh, but everything suggests we’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the coming months.

AI agents – but with a plan

AI agents were the number one topic in Munich – no surprise there. What was surprising, though, was the maturity of the conversation. Nobody’s asking whether AI agents make sense anymore. The question is: how do you deploy them without making a mess?

And here the ecosystem theme comes back again. Companies that take this seriously aren’t dropping a single agent into a single department. They’re thinking about the whole picture: who will use it, where the data comes from, how it connects to what’s already in place. A year ago, these conversations were practically non-existent.

“What struck me most was that conversations with clients in Munich didn’t start with ‘does AI pay off’ – they started with ‘how do we do this right’. That’s a real shift compared to what I was hearing just six months ago.” – Piotr Bizukojc, Account Executive at Sii Poland

The best conversations happened over coffee

The talks were good, but the real value of the conference was in the hallways. That’s where, between sessions, the conversations happened that left the most to think about.

There was a lot of discussion about the future of work in an AI world – not driven by fear, but by a genuine search for a new division of roles between people and machines. Another hot topic was how do you measure the real gains from AI in software development? How much does it actually speed up teams? Which metrics are meaningful and which are just noise? Sii Poland team deals with these questions daily.

But what surprised our team the most was the most unexpected topics. Someone talked about using AI to optimize battery production for electric vehicles. Someone else – about building train schedules, where the system has to juggle thousands of variables at once. That’s exactly the kind of conversations that broaden perspective and show what’s possible in the world of AI.

See you in Munich next year!