AI Connect 2026 brought Riga’s AI community together on August 22 for a packed, single-day programme split across three tracks — Build, Use, and Explore — spanning two main stages, a rotating lineup of workshops, and a dedicated kids’ zone, all hosted at Riga Technical University.
How the Day Was Structured
The conference opened with remarks from Uldis Karlovs-Karlovskis (Founder/CTO, MoonMoon), Daria Nechepurenko (Founder/CEO, Pure Language School), and Madara Melne-Krūmiņa (Head of Digitalization Services, Latvian IT Cluster / European Digital Innovation Hub), followed by a special introduction from Guna Puce, Director of the Artificial Intelligence Centre of Latvia.
From there, the day ran on two parallel main stages — Main Moon for Use and Explore sessions, Mushroom for Build sessions — alongside dedicated workshop rooms (Skylab, AI Studio, and the Student Lounge) running throughout the afternoon.
Talks and Themes
The programme mixed big-picture thinking on where AI is heading with hands-on, practitioner-level sessions:
- Isabella Hermann (Weizenbaum Institut) opened the talks track with a look at how the stories we tell about AI shape the technologies and worlds we actually build.
- Elena Avramenko (Modaal) explored the rise of vibecoding and how no-code tools are reshaping work, life, and entrepreneurship — a theme she returned to in a hands-on workshop later in the day, “From Idea to App Store: Build your mobile business without writing code.”
- Lorenzo Satta Chiris (Excode) dug into ARC-AGI and the road to general intelligence, covering benchmarks and approaches to measuring progress.
- Māris Dreimanis (Datamed) spoke on scaling healthcare capacity with AI, pushing the conversation from hype toward high-trust execution.
- Marina Petrakova (Forbes 30 Under 30) delivered one of the day’s sharper lines with her talk “Poor People Get Chatbots. Rich People Get Humans.”
- Local voices tackled practical adoption questions in Latvian, including Kristaps Cirulis (SHIFT/SHIPYARD AI) on why AI adoption in companies isn’t moving faster, and Olavs Rāciņš (Delulu Solutions) asking whether a company can be “agentic” without operational chaos.
- Regulation got its own slot, with Sergejs Ponomarjovs (Chief AI Officer, SIA Cyber Security) walking through a practical guide to the EU AI Act for businesses.
Workshops and the Kids’ Track
Beyond the talks, AI Connect ran hands-on workshops throughout the day, including sessions on vibe-coding EU-data-compliant enterprise infrastructure, teaching Microsoft Copilot an organization’s way of working through Skills and SharePoint, and building generative AI music, image, and video projects.
The event also carved out a dedicated space for younger attendees. In Room 317 — Midlab, visitors could drop in anytime to build “Mouth Catcher,” a browser mini-game made with Google AI Studio that uses webcam face tracking to detect an open mouth and catch falling food emojis — a playful, no-registration-required introduction to AI aimed at kids, families, and the simply curious. A parallel Kids track in the Student Lounge, led by Agnese Kramēna-Juzova, ran two rounds of “Mission AI,” a workshop built around creating with — and challenging — artificial intelligence.
Closing Out
The day wrapped with two panel discussions — one on how AI is changing daily life, families, and what to expect going forward, and another on how it’s reshaping the IT development industry and engineers’ everyday work — before closing remarks and an afterparty hosted by Uldis Karlovs-Karlovskis.
Several sessions, including the AI Studio and Skylab workshop tracks, sold out well ahead of the closing panels, a sign of just how much appetite there is in Riga’s tech community for hands-on AI education alongside the big-picture talks.
Source: AI Connect 2026 official programme (aiconnect.lv)
