14 - 16 . 01 . 2027 · Iași · Palas

The festival programme.

Three days, six strands, dozens of sessions and events, spread evenly so that every audience finds what it came for. Select a day for the detailed programme.

The programme is a proposal and will be finalised in December 2026. Times and titles may change, and speakers are named as they are confirmed. The halls are the real ones at Palas Congress Hall: the main stage means Chopin and Vivaldi combined, up to 1,000 seats; the technical stage is the Mozart hall, 150 seats; the closed room is Ravel, 50 seats.

Filter by strand
14 January · Thursday

Decisions

The day for the people who decide: AI adoption with measurable returns, governance, the public sector. In parallel, the first technical thread.

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08:30 - 09:30
Registration and coffee
The exhibition area and the meeting desks open.
Foyer
09:30 - 10:00
Opening
Why January, why Iași, what three days will produce. A word from the organisers.
Main stage · Chopin + Vivaldi
10:00 - 10:45
AI adoption in companies, beyond the pilot project
What separates the companies that have moved past the experimental phase from those still repeating it. Cases with figures, failures included.
Main stage · Chopin + Vivaldi
10:00 - 10:45
The real cost of inference
What a thousand requests cost, where the money goes, what prompt caching, batching and quantisation change. Figures from systems in production.
Technical stage · Mozart
10:45 - 11:30
AI in public services: what is possible today
Assistants for dealing with citizens, document processing, investment planning. What is allowed, what is risky, what has already been tried.
Main stage · Chopin + Vivaldi
10:45 - 11:30
Going to production: from notebook to service
Architectures that hold up, observability, versioning, rollbacks. What breaks first and how you find out.
Technical stage · Mozart
11:30 - 12:00
Break and exhibition
Partner demos run in the foyer, not in presentations.
Foyer
12:00 - 13:00
Governance, compliance and public procurement of AI
The EU AI Act, risk assessment, what to ask for in a tender specification so you do not end up buying a black box.
Main stage · Chopin + Vivaldi
12:00 - 13:00
Infrastructure, GPUs and technological sovereignty
Where the data is processed, what European providers offer, when your own capacity is worth it. No ideology, with the costs on the table.
Technical stage · Mozart
13:00 - 14:15
Lunch and scheduled meetings
The first round of one-to-one meetings, arranged in advance on the basis of participant profiles.
Foyer
14:15 - 15:45
Workshop: getting your first AI system into production
A hands-on workshop for company teams: from use case to a system that runs. Limited places.
Main stage · Chopin + Vivaldi
14:15 - 15:45
Workshop: evaluating an AI system
Laptops open. Together we build an evaluation set for a real case and measure a regression between two versions.
Technical stage · Mozart
14:15 - 16:00
Round table for public authorities
A closed session, with no press and no sales presentations. What worked and what failed in projects already delivered.
Closed room · Ravel
16:00 - 17:00
Meetings between public authorities and suppliers
The B2G round, scheduled in advance on the basis of what each institution wrote at registration.
Foyer
16:00 - 17:00
Security: prompt injection and exfiltration through tools
What an attack on an agent system looks like, what filters miss, how to document an incident.
Technical stage · Mozart
17:00 - 17:30
Close of day
What was decided, and what carries over into day two.
Main stage · Chopin + Vivaldi
19:30 - 22:30
Networking dinner
The official dinner. Limited places, booked at registration.
Palas
15 January · Friday

Culture and startups

National Culture Day (Ziua Culturii Naționale) in the morning. Startups and investors in the afternoon. Eastern AI Forum, behind closed doors.

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09:00 - 09:30
Coffee
Foyer
09:30 - 10:15
The Romanian language in the age of large models
Where today's models systematically get Romanian wrong, what is missing from the training data, who should produce the missing datasets.
Main stage · Chopin + Vivaldi
09:30 - 10:15
Agents in production: what breaks on the third iteration
Orchestration, tools, memory, recovery after failure. And the cases where agents are not the answer.
Technical stage · Mozart
10:15 - 11:00
Archives, libraries, museums: after digitisation
Searching old texts, handwriting recognition, linking collections across institutions. What can be done with what has already been scanned.
Main stage · Chopin + Vivaldi
10:15 - 11:00
Retrieval-augmented generation, beyond the tutorial
Chunking, hybrid retrieval, reranking, documents in Romanian, what to do when sources contradict each other.
Technical stage · Mozart
11:00 - 11:30
Break and exhibition
Foyer
11:30 - 12:30
AI-assisted creation, copyright and what comes next
What it means for a Romanian author to have their work in the training data. European law and practice.
Main stage · Chopin + Vivaldi
11:30 - 12:30
Open models and fine-tuning
When fine-tuning makes sense and when it does not. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning, distillation, licences and what they allow you to do.
Technical stage · Mozart
11:30 - 14:00
Eastern AI Forum · closed session
Romania, the Republic of Moldova, Ukraine. Digital government, reconstruction, energy, cybersecurity, talent, European funding. Attendance is by delegation.
Closed room · Ravel
12:30 - 14:00
Lunch and scheduled meetings
The second round, with the focus on investors and startups.
Foyer
14:00 - 15:30
The pitch competition
Between 8 and 12 selected startups from Romania and the region. Five minutes to present, three for questions.
Main stage · Chopin + Vivaldi
14:00 - 15:30
Data engineering for AI
From raw data to usable datasets: cleaning, labelling, versioning, rights, personal data, Romanian-language datasets.
Technical stage · Mozart
15:30 - 16:15
Who invests in AI in Romania and the East
Funds, individual investors, EU money. What actually gets funded, and at what stage.
Main stage · Chopin + Vivaldi
15:30 - 16:15
Eastern AI Forum · public session
The conclusions of the closed session, presented to the main hall. What can be done together, and who takes it on.
Main stage · Chopin + Vivaldi
16:15 - 17:00
Demo area and announcements
The selected startups show what they have built. The first pilot projects are announced.
Foyer
17:00 - 18:00
Open discussions
An informal format, in small groups, with the day's speakers.
Foyer
20:00 - 01:00
AI After Dark
The evening that closes day two. Music, installations and the conversations that do not fit into the programme.
Palas
16 January · Saturday

Next generation

A day given over entirely to secondary-school pupils, university students and young researchers. The hackathon, the research showcase and the recruitment interviews.

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08:30 - 09:00
Team registration
Breakfast, and checking the consent forms for participants under 18.
Foyer
09:00 - 09:30
Opening of the day
Why AI matters for the generation now entering the job market.
Main stage · Chopin + Vivaldi
09:30 - 10:00
The challenges announced
The themes set by companies and public authorities. Teams that have not formed yet get together.
Main stage · Chopin + Vivaldi
10:00 - 13:00
Hackathon · first session
Concept, architecture, first prototypes. Technical and business mentors in the room.
Foyer
10:00 - 11:00
Workshop: your first AI system
For those not taking part in the hackathon. From nothing to something that runs, in sixty minutes.
Technical stage · Mozart
11:00 - 12:30
Research showcase
Posters and demos from universities and institutes. Bachelor's and master's theses on AI topics, seven minutes each.
Technical stage · Mozart
13:00 - 14:00
Lunch and mentor meetings
A short, rotating format, with mentors from companies.
Foyer
13:00 - 16:00
Recruitment interviews
For participants who have explicitly ticked that they want to be contacted. No one receives a person's data without that person's consent.
Closed room · Ravel
14:00 - 16:30
Hackathon · second session
Finishing the prototypes and preparing the presentations.
Foyer
16:30 - 17:30
Final presentations and judging
Four minutes to present, two for questions. The criteria are published in advance.
Main stage · Chopin + Vivaldi
17:30 - 18:15
Awards
The Edition 01 prizes, and what comes next for the selected teams.
Main stage · Chopin + Vivaldi
18:15 - 18:45
Festival close
What three days produced, in figures. The next edition announced.
Main stage · Chopin + Vivaldi
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