The Future We Create
I find myself, once again, standing at the dawn of technological revolution. Thirteen editions of the ECS. Thirteen remarkable journeys through the evolving landscape of technology. When I contemplate how we begun — when SharePoint Server 2013, the Office 365, and brand new Azure services were our guiding stars — I am astonished by how swiftly time advances.
Those were, indeed, exciting days. The Microsoft ecosystem was embarking on its voyage into the cloud, a journey into the unknown with seemingly infinite possibilities. And now, thirteen years hence, we find ourselves at a similar juncture, but with a different frontier before us: Artificial Intelligence.
AI permeates everything. It dominates our conversations over coffee, infuses everything we read, write, or consume. The questions we face are profound: How much AI surrounds us? How much do we truly require? How do we harness it? How do we control it? How do we integrate it into our daily work — particularly within collaboration and modern work tools atop Microsoft 365 Copilot? And, yes, the good ol’ Office 365 has been renamed twice since. :)
Those three conferences - European AI & Cloud Summit, European Collaboration Summit, and European BizApps Summit — will provide answers to many of these questions: where, to what extent, and how we implement AI in our professional endeavors, in our client projects, in our products. As an entrepreneur myself, I will be attending sessions at this conference myself, seeking insights on how we can better utilize AI for run.events, gathering ideas that will benefit our customers.
Yet let us not forget the other core subjects of this year’s ECS: collaboration, communication, security, compliance, development, and topics for makers. We have even added an entirely new event — the European BizApps Summit — to accommodate the growing Power Platform and Fabric topics, and to welcome the low code/no code maker community.
For this remarkable journey, we must express our profound gratitude to our speakers — 250 world-class experts and speakers. Microsoft folks. MVPs. Microsoft Regional Directors. They travel here at their own expense to share their knowledge and support the community. Their commitment is… extraordinary.
Additionally, we host the largest industry expo in the world, featuring 80 world-class companies whose innovations continue to shape our technological landscape. I warmly invite you to experience this remarkable showcase, to witness their groundbreaking products and transformative services firsthand. Our sponsors are not merely participants, but rather essential pillars of our vibrant community and, naturally, the beating heart of this summit.
And finally, none of this would be possible without our friends at Microsoft: their support, their engagement, their everything. This year, we must particularly acknowledge Microsoft for Startups, a premium partner of this event, with their own booth and stage. They focus on enabling innovative startups, especially AI-startups, to launch and excel. Make it a priority to visit them, to engage with them, and to attend their presentations. They are, in a word, magnificent!
With that, I welcome you to the ECS! Not everything will be perfect at this conference — remember that ECS employs exactly one individual, our wonderful Anastassia, while the remainder of our team, most of us Microsoft MVPs and Microsoft Regional Directors, work on ECS as a night job after our day work is done, pulling countless double shifts to make this possible. So if something falls short of perfection in your estimation — or better yet, if everything meets your expectations — give us a hug. We shall appreciate that… a lot. :)
