Dortmund, 9 September 2026. More than 50 executives from North Rhine-Westphalia's mid-sized companies and corporations came together this morning at TechnologieZentrumDortmund. Manufacturing, energy and grid operators, retail, commercial law firms. By the end of the morning, the KI-Bündnis had been founded.
The Opening
Over breakfast, the talk was less about croissants than about projects. Who is working on which use case, what works, where things get stuck. Mayor Alexander Kalouti then opened the program, followed by three keynotes.
Three Keynotes
AI today and tomorrow. Haris Yalcinkaya put the market in perspective: an inflated field on one side, and on the other a real potential that most organizations have yet to capture. The strongest moment came from a case this summer in which autonomous agents broke out of their sandbox during a security evaluation and compromised Hugging Face's production infrastructure. The punchline was in the investigation: the incident only became forensically traceable thanks to an open model running on the company's own infrastructure.
The AI Black Hole. My own part had the uncomfortable job of showing how AI initiatives swallow millions while valuable data leaks out of companies. About shadow AI, which has long been everyday practice in many organizations and is better read as a free requirements analysis than as a lack of discipline. About bad actors exploiting the information asymmetry between vendors and buyers, documented through three anonymized cases ranging from 50,000 euros in tuition fees up into the seven figures. About the definitional chaos that makes offers impossible to compare. And about the fact that software can now be adapted to processes instead of the other way around, because coding agents make building it yourself realistic for the first time.
AI leader instead of laggard. Sinan Kasimay showed what that looks like in practice. From the customer conversation to a finished quote before the coffee goes cold. AI apps, automated processes, built live instead of bought. This was the most important part of the morning, because it answered the question left hanging in the room after my talk: is building it yourself realistic? After the demo, that was no longer a matter of belief.
The Breakout Rooms
The real value of the morning was not on stage. After the keynotes, the group split into smaller circles, and that is where things got concrete.
What we collected: the current status quo in each organization, the actual pain points, expectations for a joint alliance, and ideas for how such an exchange has to work if it is going to hold up in day-to-day business.
The remarkable thing was the openness. Projects that are not working are not usually discussed in front of other companies. Here they were, and that is exactly what created the momentum of the morning. Again and again, organizations sat at the same table working independently on the same task, with the same open questions, without having known about each other until then.
This feedback is the foundation for everything that follows now. The alliance was deliberately not designed to completion; it will be sharpened together with its members.
The Networking
Between breakfast, keynotes and breakout rooms, time for conversation was built in on purpose. Tables were composed by industry, which made it easier to get started: when you sit next to someone facing the same task, you get to the point faster.
In the end, many of those conversations turned into concrete contacts. That was exactly the goal of the format.
The KI-Bündnis
Together we make AI a strength of the German economy.
Under this motto, the KI-Bündnis came into being today. Close to 30 sign-ups came in during the event alone.
The underlying idea is simple. Almost every company is running the same AI projects, and almost every one of them is making the same mistakes along the way. Every time from scratch, and every time at its own expense. On top of that: the organizations in the room today are in most cases not competitors. A grid operator, a pump manufacturer and a commercial law firm can share their implementation experience without any competitive disadvantage whatsoever.
The market cannot give these companies comparability. But they can give it to each other.
What members can expect:
- A closed chat room for quick exchange between events. Short question, short answer, without waiting for the next meeting. AI moves too fast to coordinate only twice a year.
- Events every six months. State of AI in autumn for management and AI strategists. The AI Sandbox in spring for IT and AI implementers, meaning the people who actually build the use cases in the end. Hands-on instead of stage, with company slots for their own solutions and open questions. The next date is 2 February 2027.
- Best practices and openly named failures. The latter is the rarer and the more valuable of the two. What one company has learned, no other has to pay for again.
- Our learnings from research and daily implementation, fed straight into the alliance.
The alliance is free of charge and non-binding, with no membership fees and no obligations. It is not an association and not a lobby group. Its value comes exclusively from the exchange among participants, and anything contributed beyond that is voluntary.
We are starting in NRW. If it holds, we will scale it further.
Any interested company can sign up at ki-buendnis.de.
Thank You
Thanks to the Innoclub for the support, to Mayor Alexander Kalouti for the opening, and above all to the company representatives. You were the heart of this morning. The exchange, the perspectives and the openness with which people talked about their own projects are what made this event.
We are looking forward to everything that follows from here.
Join the KI-Bündnis
Is your company facing the same questions as the organizations in the room today? Then sign up and benefit from the other members' experience from day one, instead of paying for the same mistakes yourself all over again.
Free of charge, non-binding, no membership fees.