ABBYY Event

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Date
Wednesday, May 6, 2026
Location
Brussels, The Hotel Brussels
Time
9:00 - 19:00 CET

Turning Complexity into Clarity

This year, enterprises are moving beyond experimentation with AI. Results now matter. At ABBYY Ascend 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. Experience it through an immersive, in-person event designed to turn complexity into clarity. Connect with peers, spark innovation, and gain a solid foundation to lead your organization into the future of enterprise AI. 

 

Why You Should Attend

Agenda

Registration and networking coffee

08:15 – 09:10

Welcome

Executive Leadership welcomes the audience and sets the stage for the day's insights.

Ulf Persson, Chief Executive Officer

09:10 – 09:30

Keynote: Intelligence That Works — Document AI in the Era of Agentic Automation

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

09:30 – 10:00

Customer Spotlight: From Documents to Decisions: Transforming Business with Document AI

In this spotlight session, a flagship customer will share how they transformed a mission-critical workflow by applying high-quality document intelligence. You will hear how reliable data extraction and clear decision logic came together to streamline a previously complex, manual process—reducing turnaround times, lowering operational risk, and improving customer experience.

10:00 – 10:30

Guest Keynote

As AI adoption accelerates in financial services, regulatory complexity is becoming a key challenge. In this keynote, Bartłomiej Nocoń will share insights on how organizations can balance innovation with compliance, with practical examples from both business and technology perspectives.

Bartłomiej Nocoń, Director The Polish Bank Association (ZBP), Board Member European Payments Council (EPC) in Brussels

10:30 - 11:00

Award Ceremony: Customer of the Year & Partner Impact Awards

Following the case study, we will present two major awards. First, the Enterprise AI Impact Award, recognizing the organizations that have most successfully transformed document complexity into clarity, setting a new industry standard. Then, we’ll celebrate our ecosystem partners with the Partner Impact Awards, honoring the partners who drive customer success and enhance the value of ABBYY solutions.

Neil Murphy, Chief Revenue Officer
Bruce Orcutt, Chief Marketing Officer

11:00 - 11:15

Break

11:15 - 11:45

Business Track 1: The Hybrid Approach: Making GenAI Production-Ready

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
Alina Sysko

11:45 - 12:30

Technical Track 1: Making LLM Document Extraction Work in Production

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.

Katalin Fazekas, Director, Pre and Post Sales

11:45 - 12:30

Lunch

12:30 – 13:45

Ascend Central Expo

13:00 - 13:45

Business Track 2: Setting the Standard for Safe, Scalable AI

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.

Jonathan Knisley, Product Marketing Manager, Process AI

13:45 – 14:30

Technical Track 2: Standardizing Document Structures for Enterprise AI

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

13:45 – 14:30

Business Track 3: From AI Experiments to Enterprise-Grade Agentic Automation

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
David Weis, Senior Technical Partner Manager at Camunda

14:30–15:15

Technical Track 3: FineReader Engine in Containers: Built for Scale

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.

Dallas James, Product Manager

14:30 – 15:15

Break

15:15 - 15:30

Partner Session: Resistant AI

15:30 - 15:50

Award Ceremony: Hackathon

A high-energy closing session highlighting the future of automation, featuring live demos from ABBYY Ascend Hackathon Excellence Award that showcase innovative Document AI solutions built by the developer community.

15:30 – 15:45

Closing Remarks

Ulf Persson, Chief Executive Officer

15:45 - 16:00

Ascend Central Reception

The event transitions into a networking reception at Ascend Central, where attendees can connect with experts and peers. During the Reception, on their booths ABBYY partners will host dedicated sessions, offering presentations and live insights into their solutions.

Joe Lemonnier, Head of Product Marketing & Threat Intelligence, Resistant AI
Tomasz Gradzik, CEO, Foresight
Adam Roman, Head of Product Innovation, eSourcing S.A.

16:00 – 19:00

Meet Our Speakers

ulf-persson_white-background

Ulf Persson

Chief Executive Officer, ABBYY

maxime-vermeir_white-background

Max Vermeir

Vice President, AI Strategy, ABBYY

Bartłomiej Nocoń

Bartłomiej Nocoń

Director The Polish Bank Association (ZBP), Board Member European Payments Council (EPC) in Brussels

Marlene-Wolfgruber_white-background

Marlene Wolfgruber

Product Marketing Lead, AI, ABBYY

Slavena-Hristova_white-background

Slavena Hristova

Director of Product Marketing, ABBYY

Jonathan-Knisley

Jonathan Knisley

Product Marketing Manager, Process AI, ABBYY

Dallas-James

Dallas James

Product Manager, ABBYY

Katalin Fazekas

Katalin Fazekas

Director, Pre and Post Sales, ABBYY

Alina Sysko

Alina Sysko

Solution Architect, ABBYY

Joe_Lemonnier

Joe Lemonnier

Head of Product Marketing & Threat Intelligence, Resistant AI

David Weis

David Weis

Senior Technical Partner Manager, Camunda

Tomasz Gradzik

Tomasz Gradzik

CEO, Foresight

If you are an ABBYY partner or know a partner who may be interested, please do not register on this page. Please contact us / your ABBYY Partner Account Manager for more information.

Platinum Sponsor

resistant_logo_dark-500x500

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

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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.

Sponsors

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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. 

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Camunda

Camunda enables organizations to orchestrate processes across people, systems, and devices to continuously overcome complexity and increase efficiency.

Parascript

Parascript

 AI-powered SDKs for accurate check recognition, handwriting capture, and fraud detection—integrating seamlessly for faster processing and stronger protection without disrupting operations. 

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Reveille Software

 Reveille ensures automation is always working by delivering Service Level Assurance for the document-centric processes that power modern enterprises. 

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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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