Dive into the Deep
Yuma AI Summit
New Roads for Success in the Age of AI Transformation
Wednesday, 14 October 2026 | Elisabeth Center Antwerp
The rules have changed. Has your organization?
AI is transforming every industry. As powerful AI becomes accessible to everyone, technology alone is no longer a competitive advantage. The real advantage lies in what your organization does with it: how you make decisions, organize work, combine human and machine intelligence, create value and shape what comes next.
This exclusive full-day executive AI summit is designed for leaders ready to turn AI into a true organizational capability.
Throughout the day, you’ll discover practical frameworks, real-world insights and concrete approaches for rethinking how your organization operates in the Age of AI.
You’ll explore how to:
- Move from isolated AI pilots to lasting organizational change
- Identify where AI can create meaningful value
- Design effective collaboration between people and AI
- Build an organization capable of learning and adapting as AI evolves
Whether you’re defining your AI strategy, scaling successful initiatives or deciding what should follow your first wave of AI investments, you’ll leave with a sharper view of the decisions ahead and where to focus next.
What makes this summit different is the people you’ll learn from. Leaders and practitioners with first-hand experience of AI Transformation will open up the decisions, frameworks, successes and failures behind their work, sharing what they’ve learned along the way.
Because the organizations that will lead in the Age of AI won’t simply be the ones that use the most AI. They’ll be the ones that learn faster, decide better, adapt continuously, and turn technology into lasting advantage.
Registrations are closed
» Date
14 October 2026
09h00 - 17h00
» Location
A Room with a ZOO - Darwin Hall
Koningin Astridplein 20-26
2018 Antwerp
» Admission fee
Free
Agenda
The summit brings Dive into the Deep to life. Each part of the program follows a chapter of the book, exploring its key ideas and frameworks through real-world experience and discussion.
Every session includes time for Q&A, giving you the opportunity to exchange ideas with peers and learn directly from leaders putting AI Transformation into practice.
Morning
08h30 - 09h00: Registration & Coffee
09h00 - 09h20: Welcome
- A short introduction to the day, the changing AI landscape, and why AI transformation requires more than technology. The focus shifts from using AI to transforming with it.
09h20 - 10h00: Why the Rules Have Changed - Yuma
- AI is no longer just another digital technology. It changes how organizations work, make decisions and create value and challenges many of the assumptions of traditional digital transformation.
10h00 - 10h45: How Leaders Define Direction - Yuma
- Where should you start and where should you not? Explore how leaders turn AI ambition into a clear direction through purpose, strategic choices, transformation principles, and experimentation.
10h45 - 11h00: Coffee Break
11h00 - 11h45: The Design of AI Transformation - How to create direction when neither the technology nor the destination is fixed - Total Design
- AI transformation is not just a technology challenge. The future of AI is uncertain. The future of organizations is uncertain. Even the future role of people is uncertain. That is precisely why design becomes crucial. Not design as aesthetics, but design as a discipline for creating direction, meaning, collaboration, and adaptability.
11h45 - 12h30: Designing AI That Designs Us - Yuma
- What changes when AI becomes an integral part of the systems people work in? Discover a different way to design AI solutions and translate them into real-world value through artifacts and prototypes.
Lunch
12h30 - 13h30: Lunch
Afternoon
13h30 - 14h00: When Technology Designs Back: Cloud, AI and the Architecture of Change - Yuma
- We design technology to change our businesses. But what happens when that technology starts changing us. As AI becomes embedded in how organizations operate, Cloud is becoming more than the technology underneath it. In this talk, we explore the hidden relationship between how organizations are designed, the technology they create, and their ability to turn AI into real business value.
14h00 - 14h30: Making AI Transformation Work + Akgent Case by SD Worx: Yuma + SD Worx
- Great ideas don't automatically become transformation. This session explores how to move from experimentation to implementation, manage risk and adoption, and scale what works across the organization.
- A real-world look at AI collaboration in action. Pieter Mergan, Director Digital Operations, shares how SD Worx is using Akgents to rethink knowledge work and explore new forms of human–AI collaboration.
14h30 - 15h30: NVIDIA AI Blueprint - Nvidia
- From foundation models to real-world AI systems: NVIDIA shows how AI Blueprints can accelerate the journey from AI capability to practical enterprise applications.
15h30 - 15h45: Coffee Break
15h45 - 16h15: Building the Organization of Tomorrow - Yuma
- AI transformation ultimately changes more than technology and processes. Explore what happens to roles, capabilities, collaboration, and organizational design when humans and AI start working together.
16h15 - 16h45: AI Sovereignty - Yuma
- Who controls your AI future? Explore the strategic choices around data, models, infrastructure, technology providers, and governance, and how organizations can retain control over the capabilities that matter most.
16h45 - 17h00: Closing Keynote: AI Transformation Needs Vision - Yuma
- AI Transformation requires more than a roadmap. It requires the vision to imagine a different organization, the will to pursue it, and the courage to change.
17h00 - 18h00: Networking
From AI Initiatives
to Organizational Capability
Who should attend?
- Senior executives, business leaders and decision-makers responsible for shaping their organization's AI strategy
- CIOs, CTOs, Chief Digital Officers and Chief Innovation Officers driving digital and AI Transformation
- Business and technology leaders looking to move beyond AI experimentation and create measurable business value
- Enterprise architects, transformation leaders and AI strategists designing the future of their organizations
- Executives responsible for leading organizational change, innovation and business transformation
Are you responsible for strategy, innovation, technology or transformation? This summit is for you.
Please note: this is an executive event focused on leadership, strategy and organizational transformation. It is not a technical conference about coding, prompt engineering or AI development.
Business value starts with better decisions
Meet the speakers
Michel Herquet - Yuma
Michel Herquet is Managing Partner AI Transformation at Yuma and co-author of Dive into the Deep – New Roads for Success in the Age of AI Transformation. With extensive experience helping organizations navigate complex digital and AI transformations, he advises executive teams on turning AI into sustainable business value.
Michel is a recognized thought leader on organizational transformation, helping leaders move beyond technology adoption to build future-ready organizations where humans and AI work together effectively.
Mihailo Backović - Yuma
Mihailo Backović is Managing Partner AI at Yuma and co-author of Dive into the Deep – New Roads for Success in the Age of AI Transformation. Passionate about the intersection of technology, business and human potential, he helps organizations harness AI to drive innovation and long-term transformation.
Combining deep expertise in AI strategy with a pragmatic approach to implementation, Mihailo works with executive teams to turn emerging technologies into real business impact while preparing organizations for the future of Human + AI collaboration.
Vincent Boucher - Yuma
Vincent Boucher is Managing Partner at Yuma, where he helps organizations turn Artificial Intelligence into practical business value. With a background in physics and a PhD in cosmology, he combines deep scientific expertise with extensive experience in AI strategy, enterprise AI architecture and sovereign AI.
Vincent advises executive teams on designing AI solutions that are innovative, pragmatic and secure, enabling organizations to accelerate transformation while maintaining control over their most critical assets.
Bert Ertman - Yuma
Bert Ertman is a technology leader, international speaker, and author with 25+ years of experience in software, cloud, and digital transformation. At Yuma, he focuses on turning emerging technology into meaningful business change, helping organizations use Cloud, AI, and modern software engineering to innovate, adapt, and create lasting business value.
As a recognized voice in the international technology community, Bert combines deep technical expertise with a strong focus on how technology can drive real organizational and business impact.
Martijn Arts - Total Design
Martijn Arts is a Strategy Director at Total Design, working at the intersection of business, technology, and design. With a background in Industrial Design Engineering and extensive experience in strategy, digital transformation, and innovation, he helps organizations navigate change and translate complex challenges into clear strategic direction.
Martijn strongly advocates for collaborative systems, bringing together people, technology, and design to build organizations and brands ready for the future.
Pieter Mergan - SD Worx
Pieter Mergan is Director of Digital Operations at SD Worx, driving digital transformation and innovation with a strong focus on AI and customer excellence. His work centers on applying agentic AI in real-world business environments, combining human expertise, technology, and governance to create scalable solutions that deliver tangible customer value.
Igor Soltysik - Nvidia
Igor Soltysik is a Solution Architect for Benelux & Nordics at NVIDIA, helping partners and customers design and deploy AI infrastructure for the next wave of accelerated computing. His work focuses on AI Factory design, agentic AI, and harnessing AI agents to turn enterprise use cases into scalable, production-ready architectures.
About the book
Dive into the Deep - New Roads for Success in the Age of AI transformation
It won't come as a surprise to you: Artificial Intelligence is reshaping the world at an unprecedented pace. While most organizations are eager to adopt AI, many are struggling to translate that ambition into meaningful business value.
In Dive into the Deep (New Roads for Success in the Age of AI Transformation), Michel Herquet and Mihailo Backović offer a bold vision for the Age of AI. AI Transformation forces organizations to rethink strategy, governance, leadership, design, and the relationship between human and machine intelligence.
Expect thought-provoking ideas, practical frameworks, real-world examples, and refreshing insights to help you answer some of the most important questions organizations face in the Age of AI:
- Why should we embrace AI in the first place?
- How can we create lasting value beyond isolated pilots and proofs of concept?
- What does effective human-AI collaboration look like?
- How can organizations remain resilient, relevant, and competitive in a world where intelligence itself is becoming a commodity?
From Transformation Compasses and AI Playgrounds to collaborative intelligence, agentic systems, and new governance models, this book offers a fresh lens on AI Transformation. Through novel concepts and perspectives, it challenges conventional thinking and invites leaders to reconsider how intelligence creates value.
The future doesn't belong to organizations that use AI. It belongs to those courageous enough to transform with it. Are you in?
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