On 24–25 September 2025, the RAI in Amsterdam becomes a meeting ground for people dealing with the real problems of scaling AI. TechEx Europe is not a single-track show—it’s five events co-located under one roof: AI & Big Data Expo, Cyber Security & Cloud Expo, IoT Tech Expo, Digital Transformation Week, and Data Centre Expo. The headline number is 8,000+ attendees and 250+ speakers. But the real value is in the specifics: how leaders move from small pilot projects to AI systems running across entire enterprises, and what actually breaks along the way.

Why this event matters now

AI adoption has moved fast. Many companies aren’t asking “should we use AI?” anymore. The question is “how do we keep it running, monitored, and trusted at scale?” That shift changes the work. Infrastructure costs rise. Agentic AI raises fresh concerns about autonomy and decision-making. Governance frameworks that were nice-to-have suddenly become unavoidable. If you don’t handle these issues, the result isn’t just slower progress—it’s regulatory risks, wasted budgets, and systems that can’t be trusted.

The agenda is built around operations

The AI & Big Data Expo is the core track. Here, speakers like Maxim Romanovsky from Deutsche Bank will dig into compliance-heavy environments where trust and regulation can’t be ignored. John Hearty from Mastercard brings lessons on moving beyond the prototype stage. Reddit’s Alexander Gee and PepsiCo’s Altaf Patel add sector-specific takes: moderation at scale and supply chain optimization. These are not abstract debates, but operational cases of what works and what doesn’t.

Other tracks connect the dots. At the Data Centre Expo, NVIDIA’s Vladimir Prodanovic and Equinix’s Simon Goldthorpe will share what infrastructure looks like when AI workloads dominate—latency, compute, storage planning. In Cyber Security & Cloud Expo, NATO’s Andrew Byrd and Philips’ Amir Vashkover will focus on securing environments where autonomous systems operate. Skipping security is one of the most common mistakes. It leads to brittle deployments where an AI system can be exploited or simply fail under stress.

Practical themes to watch

Scaling responsibly comes first. Too many organizations stay in pilot mode for too long, and when they push forward, they underestimate monitoring. TechEx puts governance and monitoring as recurring topics—because once you move to agentic AI, the stakes get higher. Misaligned systems can make decisions faster than you can intervene. Without governance, leaders end up with technology they can’t explain to regulators or customers.

Infrastructure readiness is another theme. Many enterprises still treat compute and networking as an afterthought. That’s a mistake. AI workloads demand low-latency access to reliable data and heavy compute. Without that, you get models that perform in testing but collapse under production load. Sessions with infrastructure providers are designed to give leaders a playbook for planning costs and capacity, not just shiny proof-of-concept demos.

Cross-disciplinary learning is built into the event. AI doesn’t live in isolation. The IoT, digital transformation, and cybersecurity tracks show how AI interacts with enterprise ecosystems. Leaders who only focus on their AI bubble miss out on integration issues—like how IoT data quality affects model performance, or how cloud architecture limits AI scale.

What attendees can actually do there

The event is structured so you can do more than sit in keynotes. You can focus on technical sessions that show deployment practices, or attend conceptual talks that raise bigger questions about autonomy and ethics. You’ll have peer-to-peer exchanges with executives wrestling with the same operational roadblocks. Vendor and data centre discussions provide opportunities to benchmark costs. Panels on agentic AI decision-making allow you to test your governance approaches against what others are doing.

Bottom line

For AI leaders, TechEx Europe 2025 is less about hype and more about confronting the messy middle of enterprise deployment. The mistakes are predictable: ignoring governance, underestimating infrastructure, treating AI as a side experiment. The consequences are equally predictable: loss of trust, runaway costs, fragile systems. This event brings together case studies, infrastructure expertise, and cross-disciplinary insight to help avoid those traps. Two days in Amsterdam won’t solve AI operations for anyone, but it will expose leaders to the practical realities of what it takes to move from experimental AI to scalable, trusted, and autonomous systems.