My generation, people in their 50s, is the only generation who set up printers for our parents and for our kids.
There is a reason for that, and it is not that we are particularly good with printers. It is that we have had to learn this industry from scratch more times than is reasonable. We started with the eight-bit machines in our childhood. Then PCs. The internet. Mobile. Cloud. And now AI. Every few years, someone announces that everything is about to change, and quite often they turn out to be right - just never in the way we expected in the beginning.
So when people ask what it feels like to work in tech in 2026, my honest answer is: familiar. We have seen this phase before. Not this specific technology (AI is genuinely its own thing!), but this phase. The one where the initial noise has quieted down, the hype balloon has deflated, and the real questions have arrived. How do we govern agents in production? What does Copilot adoption actually look like after the pilot? What does the EU AI Act mean for the thing we shipped last month?
These are not exciting questions. They are the questions you ask when something has stopped being new and started being work. And that is exactly where AI is right now, and exactly what this year's ECS is about.
That is why our three conferences (European Collaboration Summit, European AI & Cloud Summit, European BizApps Summit) matter more this year, not less. The easy part of AI is over. The part where experience counts has begun, and experience is the one thing this community has in abundance.
For that, we owe our speakers — 250 of them, MVPs, Regional Directors, Microsoft engineers, practitioners — who fly to Cologne at their own expense to stand in front of us and share their knowledge. Our sponsors, 80 of them, who build the tools the rest of us rely on. And of course, Microsoft, whose support makes all of this possible. Numerous Microsoft people are with us this year, two Microsoft Vice Presidents among them.
Two things are new this year. With three thousand people, eighty sponsors, and roughly fifteen waking hours per day, you don't have time to meet everybody, and every year people leave wondering who they missed. So we have done something about it: as far as we can tell, ECS 2026 is the first major tech conference anywhere to run AI-powered matchmaking at this scale (thanks, run.events!), recommending the people, sessions, sponsors, and products most relevant to you, with the reasoning visible behind every match. Log in, set your profile to public, and let it work.
The other new thing: this is our first year at Confex, in Cologne. It is a beautiful building, it is also a new building, and some of us are finding the coffee for the first time along with you. Yes, we also find the escalators leading directly to the second floor a bit... weird. Be patient with the escalators. Be patient with the signage. Be patient with us. :)
And finally (as always!), if something is not perfect, give us a hug. If everything is perfect, give us a hug anyway. We are a small team of MVPs, Regional Directors, and one extraordinary Anastassia, doing this after our day jobs because we love doing it. The hug is what we are here for.
Welcome to ECS 2026.