Uphill Conf 2026 (6th edition)
7. & 8. May, 2026 | Bern, Switzerland
In 2026, the AI community gathered on Bern's Gurten for Uphill Conf's sixth edition, where software developers moved past the prototype stage to what it actually takes to run AI in production. Engineers from Swisscom, Digitec Galaxus and the open-source AI ecosystem shared architecture decisions, cost and performance trade-offs, evaluation and security practices, and honest lessons from systems that had been live for a year or more. Across a day of hands-on workshops and a day of curated talks above the city, the conference traded hype for patterns that teams could take home and use.
Talks 2026
Gemma, Google DeepMind's Family of Open Models
Omar Sanseviero
Building Software Will Never Be the Same Again
Romain Jourdan
20 Years of Data: Building finetuning datasets and fixing search along the way
Niklaus Hofer
Agentic Debt: Why the AI Value Gap Isn’t About Models
Lokesh Mishra
Docling: Insights & Lessons from Building an Open-Source AI Standard for Unstructured Data
Panos Vagenas
Open by Design: Cost-Efficient Private AI Platforms
Cyrill Rüttimann, Valentin Verschinin
Building AI-Native Products: A Design + Engineering Playbook
Isa Simó, Miquel Farré
An explainable agentic interface for Swisscom's real-time enterprise knowledge graph
Nikola Hardi
Your RAG System Has a Backdoor: Security for LLM Applications
Lisa Carpenter
Imagineering future interfaces
Charlie Gerard
Apertus: Democratizing Open and Compliant LLMs For Global Language Environments
Imanol Schlag
Agents building Agents on the Hugging Face hub
Ben Burtenshaw
The Unsexy Side of AI: Evals, Constraints, and Saying No
Cliff des Ligneris
Rethinking UX with Gen AI
Alain Leclerc von Bonin
Building AI at Scale: Lessons from establishing AI at Digitec Galaxus
Ryan Prater
Workflows, Agents, and Multi-Agent Systems
Louis-François Bouchard
Speakers 2026
Omar Sanseviero
Developer Experience lead @ Google DeepMind
Charlie Gerard
Senior Research Engineer @ CrowdStrike
Ben Burtenshaw
Machine Learning Engineer @ Hugging Face
Louis-François Bouchard
CTO & Co-Founder @ Towards AI
Romain Jourdan
Chief Technologist @ AWS
Niklaus Hofer
CTO @ stepping stone AG
Lokesh Mishra
Chief AI Officer @ Mentiora AI
Panos Vagenas
Advisory Software Engineer @ IBM Research
Cyrill Rüttimann
Technology Strategist @ ipt
Valentin Verschinin
Principal Architect @ ipt
Miquel Farré
Head of AI @ Studio Jadu
Isa Simó
Product Design Lead @ Studio Jadu
Lisa Carpenter
Lead Data Science & AI Instructor @ Digital Futures
Imanol Schlag
Co-Lead Apertus, the Swiss AI Initiative's LLM Effort @ ETH AI Center
Cliff des Ligneris
Lead Product Manager @ GetYourGuide
Alain Leclerc von Bonin
AI Product Designer @ viboo
Ryan Prater
Product Manager - Search @ Digitec Galaxus