Applying AI Events in Brussels

"AI research" and "AI in production" are two pretty different worlds at this point. This page collects events from the production side: how teams integrate LLMs into real products, build agents that are worth trusting, wire up RAG pipelines that don't quietly hallucinate, and ship Copilot-style features without breaking the rest of the app. Agentic coding is a particularly active thread right now, with dedicated meetups and studios popping up across the continent.

This page narrows the Brussels calendar to Applying AI events. It's a subset of Belgium's wider tech-event schedule, useful when you want something specific to go to in the city this month.

Brussels is unusually weighted toward tech-policy and open-source events because of the EU institutions concentrated in the city. FOSDEM each February is one of the largest open-source conferences in the world and draws tens of thousands. Around it, the calendar is full of AI-governance, data-protection, cybersecurity-policy, and platform-regulation events that reflect Brussels' role as the policy capital of European tech.

Join us on Thursday 3 September at 17:30 to discuss whether the public sector has the skills to deliver its AI ambitions.

Join us on Thursday 3 September at 17:30 for an evening built around a question every public institution is grappling with right now: if there is an AI strategy, do we also have the workforce to deliver it?

FARI, CEPS and VUCABLE join forces for this session, marking the local launch of MagiX, a new Master's programme in digital governance and transformation, AI and data, and human centred design for the public sector. Expect an informal, conversational evening, with plenty of room for your own questions and a proper networking moment to close.

This in person event takes place on Thursday 3 September at 17:30 in the FARI Test & Experience Centre (Cantersteen 16, 1000 Brussels).

Invited guest : Amy Carmichael works with the Ada Lovelace Institute, researching how public institutions in the UK adopt data and AI in practice, with a recent focus on local authorities and social care. Her work looks closely at how frontline services take on new technology, and where oversight keeps pace with adoption, and where it does not.

Description of the session : The evening opens with a keynote grounded in direct research into AI adoption in UK local government and social care, touching on the pace of oversight relative to tool rollout, and the practical realities frontline staff face day to day.

A moderated discussion with FARI, CEPS and VUCABLE then widens the conversation to what a real skills gap looks like in public administration, how AI adoption can narrow or widen existing inequalities between institutions and staff, and what the future of public sector work looks like as these tools become part of daily practice.

These questions show up across every layer of digital government right now: through procurement, design processes, frontline services adopting new tools faster than the safeguards built to govern them, or data foundations too patchy to support what is being asked of them.

Is this for you? This session is for you if you work in or with government and feel the distance between the AI strategy on the shelf and the AI actually happening on the ground. It is just as much for you if you are building toward that kind of work, whether already inside an institution or on the way there. Public sector professionals, digital transformation leads, and anyone developing these skills are welcome to join.

A balanced mix of learning and networking: the evening closes with an open Q&A, plenty of room for your own questions, and informal networking with the speaker and the three partner organisations over drinks.

This event is free to attend, but registration is compulsory. It is organized by FARI, CEPS and VUCABLE.

Summary

Time: Thursday, September 3, 17:30–19:00
Place: FARI Test & Experience Centre, Cantersteen 16, 1000 Brussels
Speaker: Amy Carmichael (Ada Lovelace Institute)
Networking: Drinks & snacks after the session
Cost: Free to attend
Target Audience: Public sector professionals, policymakers, GovTech practitioners, researchers, students, and AI enthusiasts

Five Gaps, Five Answers, Your Reality Check

Most AI policy aimed at women is about training. Learn the tools, take the course, adapt. That answers one question and skips a harder one: who owns the firms, who wins the contracts, who decides how the technology gets deployed, and who absorbs the cost of the change.

Task Force 3 of Thematic Working Group 6 (Women Shaping the AI Economy), part of the European Union funded Connecting Women in Digital Forum, has spent this year on that harder question. Our preliminary findings set out five gaps in the way European AI and transition policy is currently built, and five answers designed to be inserted into instruments already moving through Brussels rather than proposed as a separate equality agenda sitting next to them.

Before this goes to the Connecting Women in Digital Summit in Dublin, we want it tested by the women it is supposed to serve.

What we will put to you:

What "good jobs" should mean when AI arrives in the sectors where women actually work
Why just transition funding organised around regions misses AI, which cuts across occupations and tasks instead
How public procurement quietly decides which firms get to supply AI, and why so few of those firms are women-led
Where the money stops for women founders, and what the Commission's own strategy already admits about it
What we should be measuring, and what today's metrics keep out of sight

This is an interactive session, not a presentation. If you run a business, hire, sell to public buyers, or work inside an organisation deploying AI, your experience is evidence. Come and tell us what we have missed.

About our speakers,

Catherine Mulligan, Ph.D. FHEA

Catherine leads Task Force 3. She is the founder of Digital Crossroads, a virtual lab bringing researchers, technologists and policymakers together around the data economy, and a visiting academic in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, where she previously co-directed the Centre for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering. She is the author of multiple books.

Caroline De Cock, LL.M.

Caroline is a technology and AI policy strategist working at the intersection of AI governance, digital rights and public discourse. She is Head of Research at information labs, a Senior Fellow at the Lisbon Council, and the founder of N-square Consulting and Square-up Agency. She is the author of AI Tools, Not Gods: Why Artificial Intelligence Hype Threatens Global Governance and How to Fix It (2026).

Alexander Galt

Alexander is Digital Ethics Leader at IKEA and sits on the board of MyData Global. He was previously a digital ethicist at Deloitte and a data scientist at the United Kingdom Government Digital Service, and his published work includes policy recommendations on ethical and responsible AI.

Applying AI Events in Brussels

Upcoming Applying AI events in Brussels

AI Talk | The public sector has an AI Strategy. Does it have the skills?

A Just AI Transition for Women

Café IA Bruxelles : Lancement