At Berlin’s BIG BANG KI Festival 2026, the appetite for AI is unmistakable. What we’re being fed is another question.

There is a giant pink elephant in the room at the BIG BANG KI Festival. Literally. Its name is AI – and someone brought a suitably proportioned visual aid to represent it.

For the record, the elephant belongs to YES!CON @ WORK and their campaign about cancer in the workplace. A serious subject, for sure. But we’ll run with the AI metaphor anyway.

The BIG BANG KI Festival took over STATION Berlin on 16–17 September 2026. I went along to see how much of the future was actually on display, and how much was a familiar business conference wearing a new lanyard.

People have questions. Lots of them.

The most convincing thing I saw was the audience. The place was packed. Keynotes were full. Outside the masterclasses, people queued for a chance to get in. To catch a glimpse of the BIG BANG that AI is going to bring.

And you could see why. The 2026 programme covered everything from rescuing failed AI projects to why prompt engineering isn’t an operating model and whether quantum computing has anything useful to say about AI.

I didn’t sit through all of those sessions. The queues told their own story.

Whatever you think of the AI boom, people want to understand what’s actually happening. Not another keynote telling them everything is about to change. They’ve heard that bit. They want to know what works, what doesn’t and what they can actually do with it.

BIG BANG KI Festival does a pretty good job of giving them somewhere to start. You don’t need a machine-learning doctorate or a strongly held opinion about vector databases. Curiosity will get you through the door.

Assuming you can get through the queue.

Everybody’s doing AI. Apparently.

This is where things start to feel a little odd. Walk around long enough and it starts to seem as though every business, every consultant and every conversation now deals in AI.

Sure, it’s an AI festival. You’d expect AI to be everywhere. But are all of those connections meaningful? Sometimes, absolutely. Other times, you wonder whether AI is actually part of the product, or just part of the pitch.

Are we looking at new technology? Learning how to apply existing tools? Discussing management? Being sold something? All legitimate activities. It just gets harder to tell when they all arrive in the same AI-shaped wrapper.

There’s a slightly sad feeling underneath the excitement: AI is becoming so compulsory as a label that it risks becoming useless as a description. Less talk of transformation. I’d rather hear precisely what a system does, where it fails and, most importantly, why I should care.

Where is the German tech swagger? Does it exist?

I also left wanting a stronger sense of Germany as a place actually building this stuff. Not just businesses scrambling to figure out how they should use AI, but people making things that made me stop and think: damn, they’re actually building something. From what I saw, the BIG BANG KI Festival did not make a convincing case that Germany is leading this field.

There was technology on display, of course. Siemens was talking industrial AI. SAP was there with business applications. CANCOM advertised a live voice-agent demonstration. But I wanted more than that. More working systems. More demos. More real problems. More actual solutions.

Maybe it was there and I missed it. Maybe that’s not what the BIG BANG KI Festival is trying to be. But amid all the talk about what AI is going to do to German business, I wanted a little more German tech swagger. Less discussion about the need to get moving. More evidence that we already are.

Human connections. Artificial barriers.

The BIG BANG KI Festival has clearly succeeded in getting people through the door. The next challenge is making better use of having so many of them in one place.

Networking is one example. There’s no shortage of interesting people to meet, but finding the people you actually need to meet is another matter. The organisers provide app-based matching, messaging and bookable networking points, but I’d still like more hosted introductions and smaller, focused conversations that bring people working on similar problems together.

Then there’s the more literal problem of fitting everyone in. Masterclasses were packed, with queues forming outside the rooms. That’s a great problem for a festival to have, but not such a great one for the person standing in the corridor. If demand keeps growing, so does the need for more workshop capacity.

So, who is BIG BANG actually for?

You’ll probably get something out of it if:

• You’re curious about AI and want to understand what’s actually going on, pick up some ideas and talk to people who can explain the bits you don’t understand.
• You want a company-funded trip to Berlin. Just attend enough sessions to keep the expense report plausible.

It’s a harder recommendation if:

• You already work deeply in AI and are looking for genuinely new ideas.
• You want specialised sessions that go well beyond the introduction.
• You want a tightly focused audience of peers working on the same problems.

For those visitors, I’d study the programme carefully and arrange relevant meetings beforehand. Inspiration is great. But it’s not always worth two days away from the thing you’re actually trying to build.

See you in 2027. Assuming there is one.

The next BIG BANG KI Festival is announced for 10–11 November 2027, again at STATION Berlin. Judging by the crowds this year, there’s clearly an audience for it. Give that audience more depth, more room and better ways to find one another, and there’s plenty of reason to come back. We may even be there. Provided AI hasn’t killed us all by then.

One final note. The BIG BANG KI Festival told attending media: “Mit einer Teilnahme am BIG BANG KI Festival erwarten wir eine journalistische Berichterstattung.” Well, you asked for it.