---
title: ABBYY Ascend 2026 · Brussels
description: At ABBYY Ascend 2026 Brussels, discover how purpose-built Document AI turns business-critical documents into trusted, actionable data — powering intelligent automation, informed decision-making, and next-generation AI use cases.
image: https://digital.abbyy.com/hubfs/images/lp/Ascend%20Event%20Series%202026/Sharing/DSD-1633-ascend-2026-banner-join-us-1200x628-brussels.jpg
---
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- [On-Demand](https://digital.abbyy.com/ascend-2026-brussels-on-demand#form)
- [Agenda](https://digital.abbyy.com/ascend-2026-brussels-on-demand#agenda)
- [Speakers](https://digital.abbyy.com/ascend-2026-brussels-on-demand#speakers)
- [Sponsors](https://digital.abbyy.com/ascend-2026-brussels-on-demand#Sponsors)
### Ascend Brussels 2026 On-Demand
[Access Event Presentations](https://digital.abbyy.com/ascend-2026-brussels-on-demand#form)
Ascend Brussels brought together enterprise leaders, customers, partners, and ABBYY experts for a day of discussions around trusted AI, intelligent document processing, automation, fraud prevention, and AI-ready data strategies.
Across keynote sessions, customer discussions, workshops, and networking moments, attendees explored how organizations are scaling AI and automation in enterprise environments.
### What you’ll access
#### Keynote highlights and expert insights
#### Selected presentations and event materials
#### Featured speaker sessions
# Ascend Brussels 2026 On-Demand
[Access Event Presentations](https://digital.abbyy.com/ascend-2026-brussels-on-demand#form)
## Agenda
### Welcome
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Executive Leadership welcomes the audience and sets the stage for the day's insights.
**Ulf Persson**, Chief Executive Officer
### Intelligence That Works — Document AI in the Era of Agentic Automation
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Enterprises are moving beyond generic AI toward solutions that deliver reliable, measurable results—especially in the document-heavy workflows that power their business. In this keynote, we introduce how ABBYY’s purpose-built Document AI models and domain-specific VLMs enable agents to read, interpret, and act on business-critical documents with accuracy and confidence. We will share the latest market trends, customer outcomes, and the rapidly growing need for standards-based, trustworthy extraction as the foundation for safe and scalable agentic automation. Attendees will see how high-quality document intelligence is transforming workflows across finance, operations, compliance, and customer experience, and why “intelligence that works” begins with getting your documents right.
**Max Vermeir**, Vice President, AI Strategy
### Keynote: A 7-Step Plan to Embed AI Into Your Organization
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AI is everywhere, yet most organizations are still stuck in initiatives that don't scale. The real question is not whether to adopt AI, but how to embed it structurally beyond the hype so it becomes part of how your organization actually operates. This session presents a concrete 7 step plan to build a living AI model in motion: from designing the right governance and roles to creating the accountability that make it last. We will discuss how to assign ownership, spark genuine enthusiasm across teams, and turn AI from a side project into a core organisational capability. Because purposeful AI transformation is not just about the technology. It is about the people, the structure, and the will to make it real.
**Dado van Peteghem**, Author & Keynote Speaker on Technology & AI
### Expert Talk: AI-Driven Transformation in the EU Banking Sector
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the EU banking sector, driving efficiency through automation, personalization, and cost optimization. However, this transformation is not without its challenges. This session will explore the technological hurdles, including data quality, legacy system integration, cybersecurity, and explainability, alongside the regulatory and supervisory complexities such as compliance costs, oversight, and accountability. By examining real-world examples of AI implementation in banks, we will uncover actionable insights into how institutions can navigate these challenges while leveraging AI to achieve sustainable growth and innovation. Join us to delve into the future of banking in the EU, where technology and regulation intersect.
**Bartłomiej Nocoń**, Director **The Polish Bank Association (ZBP)**, Board Member **European Payments Council (EPC) in Brussels**
Business Track 1
### The Hybrid Approach: Making GenAI Production-Ready
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Generic LLMs promise flexibility but often fail on accuracy, predictability, and cost control in document-heavy workflows. In this session, we demonstrate how ABBYY’s hybrid approach—combining purpose-built Document AI with our GenAI portfolio —delivers fast wins and production-grade performance. Learn how zero-shot extraction, auto-labelling, improved user experience, and domain-specific optimization unlock measurable impact across finance, compliance, operations, and customer onboarding.
**Slavena Hristova**, Director of Product Marketing
**Katalin Fazekas,** Director, Pre and Post Sales
Technical Track 1
### Making LLM Document Extraction Work in Production
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Go inside ABBYY’s Purpose-Built AI architecture and see how we combine domain-trained document models with foundational LLMs to minimize hallucinations, control token usage, and maximize extraction accuracy. This hands-on session walks through practical implementation patterns that make GenAI usable in real-world document workflows.
**Alina Sysko**, Solution Architect
**Brook Meier**, Director, Product Management
Business Track 2
### Setting the Standard for Safe, Scalable AI
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AI adoption without standards increases enterprise risk. In this session, learn how ABBYY is shaping the standard to define how LLMs extract, structure, and validate business-critical documents. Discover how standardized document intelligence reduces compliance risk, ensures consistency across systems, and enables scalable AI governance.
**Jon Knisley**, Product Marketing Manager, Process AI
**Marlene Wolfgruber**, Product Marketing Lead, AI
Technical Track 2
### Standardizing Document Structures for Enterprise AI
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Today’s document data formats are fragmented—XML, JSON, hOCR, ALTO—creating integration complexity. This session introduces a new standard for document extraction co-created by ABBYY. Learn how it unifies document structure representation, simplifies downstream integrations, and provides a stable backbone for enterprise-grade AI systems.
**Max Vermeir**, Vice President, AI Strategy
**Alina Sysko**, Solution Architect
Business Track 3
### From AI Experiments to Enterprise-Grade Agentic Automation
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Agentic automation promises transformation — but without governance, trusted data, and orchestration, it remains a pilot. In this session, we'll show how enterprises move from isolated GenAI use cases to fully orchestrated, business-critical workflows. You’ll learn how: Trusted document intelligence provides decision-ready data for agents. An orchestration layer governs how agents act across systems. Enterprises maintain transparency, compliance, and human oversight. Business leaders measure and scale ROI across claims, onboarding, KYC, finance, and logistics. This session is for business leaders who want to operationalize AI safely — not just experiment with it.
**Marlene Wolfgruber**, Product Marketing Lead, AI
**Olaf van Daalen**, Enterprise Account Executive, Camunda
**David Brakoniecki**, COO / Chief Delivery Officer, BP3
Partner Session
### Don't Automate Fraud: Document Integrity Best Practices for Intelligent Document Workflows
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As document automation scales, so does the risk of scaling fraud alongside it. This hands-on session explores how generative AI and mass data leaks have fundamentally shifted the threat landscape — and why document integrity checks are now an essential layer in any IDP stack. Joe Lemonnier (Head of Product Marketing and Threat Intelligence, Resistant AI) will demo how the ABBYY and Resistant AI integration detects fraudulent bank statements, tax documents, business certificates, and medical claims — and share practical steps to protect your workflows today.
**Joe Lemonnier**, Head of Product Marketing & Threat Intelligence, Resistant AI
### State of Document fraud 2026: What 170M+ Documents Reveal About Professional vs. Amateur Attacks
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Analysis of over 170 million documents across 135 countries reveals a critical blind spot in most fraud strategies: the gap between crude forgeries and industrial-scale professional attacks. While basic edits get caught, sophisticated fraud uses coordinated networks, metadata scrubbing, format hopping, and generative AI to slip through traditional controls — and that's where the real financial exposure lives. Attendees will leave knowing how to distinguish professional from amateur fraud in their own data, understand which document types and tactics their sector faces, recognize coordinated campaign patterns at scale, and design controls that go beyond surface-level checks to address the attacks that actually cost money.
**Joe Lemonnier**, Head of Product Marketing & Threat Intelligence, **Resistant AI**
### Award Ceremony: Customer Awards, MVP Awards
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We close the day by celebrating the people and organizations who bring the future of intelligent automation to life. This session brings together our customer and MVP award recipients — recognizing those who have pushed boundaries, driven real impact, and contributed to the ABBYY community in meaningful ways.
**Neil Murphy**, Chief Revenue Officer
### Closing Remarks
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Summarizing the event's key takeaways and issuing a strong call to action for future engagement.
**Ulf Persson**, Chief Executive Officer
### Partner Session: The Missing Link in IDP: Securing ABBYY Vantage & Unlocking Custom Corporate Services with the ATOM Hub
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Deploying advanced IDP platforms in large enterprises often hits a major bottleneck: the risk and complexity of connecting IDP/AI directly to legacy core systems. In this session, we will demonstrate how our proprietary ATOM Integration Hub acts as a secure "shield" and data orchestrator for ABBYY Vantage, ensuring seamless, zero-risk deployments without modifying core infrastructure. Furthermore, we will reveal how banks use this exact same ATOM architecture to rapidly build highly customized, high-volume corporate services—such as tailored reporting and specific billing models for major enterprise clients—turning an integration layer into a massive competitive advantage.
**Tomasz Gradzik**, CEO, Foresight
**Adam Roman**, Head of Product Innovation, eSourcing S.A.
### Technical Track 3: FineReader Engine in Containers: Built for Scale
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See how to operationalize ABBYY’s Document AI platform at scale using containerized deployments such as Docker. ABBYY engineers will walk through workflow orchestration—from ingestion and extraction to routing and task completion—showing how to build a scalable, high-availability architecture that supports intelligent agents and enterprise automation systems.
**Max Vermeir**, Vice President, AI Strategy
**Beth Thomas**, Director of Product, Operations and Strategic Initiatives
**Lars Mikkelsen**, Distinguished Architect
## Meet our speakers
### Ulf Persson
Chief Executive Officer, ABBYY
### Dado van Peteghem
Author & Keynote Speaker on Technology & AI
### Bartłomiej Nocoń
Director, The Polish Bank Association (ZBP), Board Member European Payments Council (EPC) in Brussels
### Joe Lemonnier
Head of Product Marketing & Threat Intelligence, Resistant AI
### Tomasz Gradzik
CEO, Foresight
### Neil Murphy
Chief Revenue Officer, ABBYY
### David Brakoniecki
COO / Chief Delivery Officer, BP3
### Max Vermeir
Vice President, AI Strategy, ABBYY
### Marlene Wolfgruber
Product Marketing Lead, AI, ABBYY
### Slavena Hristova
Director of Product Marketing, ABBYY
### Jonathan Knisley
Product Marketing Manager, Process AI, ABBYY
### Dallas James
Product Manager, ABBYY
### Katalin Fazekas
Director, Pre and Post Sales, ABBYY
### Alina Sysko
Solution Architect, ABBYY
### Olaf van Daalen
Enterprise Account Executive, Camunda
### Adam Roman
Head of Product Innovation, eSourcing S.A.
### Brook Meier
Director, Product Management, ABBYY
### Beth Thomas
Director of Product, Operations and Strategic Initiatives, ABBYY
### Lars Mikkelsen
Distinguished Architect, ABBYY
## Our valued sponsors
Platinum sponsor
### Resistant AI
Cutting-edge AI to outsmart criminals. Delivering proven and trustworthy results that protect organizations from fraud and financial crime.
We build AI to catch criminal AI — because that’s who we’ve always been. Rooted in cybersecurity, we’ve spent our careers studying adversaries, reverse-engineering threats, and designing systems that adapt faster than the fraud. Now we apply that same discipline to the hardest problem in financial crime: prevention at scale.
Premium sponsor
### eSourcing
eSourcing has been providing tailor-made mass efficiency solutions to the European banking sector for almost 30 years. We specialize in the development and outsourcing of proprietary IT solutions supporting the banking sector and the POS payment terminal market. In Central and Eastern Europe, 13 banks use eSourcing solutions for their daily business.
0/0
### Avalara
Agentic Tax and Compliance™, trusted and built to scale. Let agentic AI do the tax work. Avalara automates your compliance tasks for speed, accuracy, and scale.
### Camunda
Camunda enables organizations to orchestrate processes across people, systems, and devices to continuously overcome complexity and increase efficiency.
### Parascript
AI-powered SDKs for accurate check recognition, handwriting capture, and fraud detection—integrating seamlessly for faster processing and stronger protection without disrupting operations.
### Reveille Software
Reveille ensures automation is always working by delivering Service Level Assurance for the document-centric processes that power modern enterprises.
### SVA
SVA is one of Germany's leading IT service providers and employs more than 3.800 people at 28 locations. SVA's entrepreneurial goal is to combine high-quality IT products from leading manufacturers with SVA's project know-how, service spectrum and flexibility in order to develop optimal solutions for customers.
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