The inaugural European edition brought AI leaders from 69 countries together, with 67% holding director-level positions or above.
HumanX Amsterdam 2026 brought together 3,017 attendees from 69 countries and recorded more than 1,500 confirmed meetings, according to the conference’s newly released impact report. The three-day event, held September 22-24 at RAI Amsterdam, connected AI technology providers, enterprise decision-makers, startup founders, investors, and policymakers.
The inaugural European edition featured at least 150 sessions and 200 speakers and moderators. According to the organizer, 67% of attendees held director-level positions or above, while 54% travelled from outside the Netherlands.
The figures highlight how HumanX positioned its first Amsterdam conference around practical AI adoption, business connections, and the technologies enterprises are preparing to deploy.
Enterprise Leaders and AI Innovators Take Center Stage
HumanX attracted participants from established enterprises, emerging AI companies, investment firms, and technology organizations.
The report shows that 40% of attendees were classified as C-suite executives or founders, with another 27% serving as vice presidents or directors. One-third represented enterprises employing more than 1,000 people, while 38% came from businesses with 1–50 employees.
Geographically, 46% of attendees came from the Netherlands, followed by 25% from other EMEA markets excluding the United Kingdom, 16% from the UK, 11% from the United States, and 2% from elsewhere.
Companies represented at the conference included OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AWS, ASML, Databricks, Mistral AI, Accenture, and Siemens.
This combination brought together organizations developing AI systems and businesses evaluating how those technologies could support their operations.
HumanX also emphasized editorial independence in its conference programming, maintaining a no-pay-to-play speaker policy under which speakers were selected for their experience rather than sponsorship spending.
SolutionBridge Facilitates 500+ Enterprise AI Meetings
Structured matchmaking was a central component of the conference.
Through SolutionBridge, HumanX connected enterprise leaders evaluating AI technologies with providers offering relevant products and services.
The programme brought together 70 enterprise adopters and 45 solution providers, generating more than 1,900 matching preferences and over 500 scheduled one-to-one meetings.
Among participating adopters, 46% reported purchasing power exceeding $1 million, while 65% held director-level positions or above.
The programme used mutual-interest matching to give both parties opportunities to evaluate potential business relationships.
For enterprises, this created a setting to compare AI products, understand implementation requirements, and meet providers aligned with specific operational needs.
For technology companies, it provided access to senior professionals involved in purchasing, evaluating, or influencing AI investments.
HumanX also organized VentureConnect, a matchmaking programme connecting early-stage AI startups with investors from Europe and the United States.
The programme received more than 300 meeting requests and recorded over 125 confirmed founder-investor meetings. Its participants comprised 67% startups and 33% investors.
Across its broader networking programmes, HumanX reported 10,441 connections, including 3,445 AI-powered connections and more than 800 HumanX Connect peer meetings.
These figures measure introductions and networking activity. The report does not quantify how many meetings subsequently resulted in contracts, investments, or completed commercial partnerships.
Enterprise AI Deployment in Focus
The conference’s programming reflected a growing focus on implementing AI across business functions.
HumanX organized its sessions into five tracks: Control Room, Customer Engine, Command Desk, Builders, and Ecosystem.
These covered operational transformation, customer-facing AI applications, executive strategy, technology development, and the wider startup and investment ecosystem.
The programme included 22 roundtables, 10 masterclasses, 18 Q&A sessions, and six pitch sessions, alongside three curated Day 0 Exchanges for founders, executives, and policymakers.
Leading speakers included Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks; Marjan Rintel, CEO of KLM; Max Junestrand, co-founder and CEO of Legora; May Habib, co-founder and CEO of Writer; and Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Agentic AI at Amazon Web Services.
The programme also featured leaders from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Lovable, Cohere, and other AI companies.
Among the most-bookmarked sessions were discussions on the true cost of deploying AI at scale, the transition from models to AI agents, software development, and frontier AI technologies.
These subjects reflected the practical considerations facing enterprises as AI capabilities expand: how to integrate systems into existing workflows, establish governance, and connect technology investments to measurable results.
According to HumanX, 88% of attendees built personal session schedules before arriving, indicating strong advance engagement with the conference’s programming.
Avendar Wins HumanX Amsterdam Startup Pitch Competition
Startup innovation was another significant component of the conference.
According to the impact report, 24 startups participated across four semifinals, presenting their technologies, commercial traction, and business models to investors and potential customers.
The judging organizations included Amino Capital, Lumo Labs, Prosus Ventures, Taplow Blue Capital, Renegade Partners, and NP-Hard Ventures.
Avendar, represented by Marijn van Aerle, emerged as the competition winner.
The company develops a full-stack AI platform for European defense, civil security, and enterprise applications.
As the winning startup, Avendar received a fully funded trip to HumanX Las Vegas 2027, providing an opportunity to present its technology within the conference’s US ecosystem.
The competition offered participating startups exposure to international investors and industry decision-makers.
AI-Powered Networking Extends Beyond Conference Sessions
HumanX also integrated AI technology into the attendee experience.
According to the report, 97% of checked-in attendees used the HumanX application, which supported networking, meeting arrangements, and access to conference information.
Participants exchanged 26,761 messages, while more than 400 meetings were booked directly on the show floor.
The event also recorded 6,686 badge scans across three days.
Granola, the conference’s official AI note-taker, provided AI-generated session summaries through the HumanX application after sessions concluded.
These features supported the event’s emphasis on helping attendees discover relevant discussions, connect with participants, and access conference insights.
HumanX Amsterdam Returns in September 2027
HumanX has confirmed that its next Amsterdam edition will take place September 20–22, 2027, at RAI Amsterdam.
Following the inaugural conference’s reported attendance of 3,017 participants, the organizer is targeting 4,000 attendees for 2027.
The next edition will build on the conference’s focus on enterprise AI deployment, technology innovation, investor connections, and collaboration between European and international AI ecosystems.
The 2026 impact report establishes a baseline for that growth through attendance, seniority, meetings, and participation figures.
The next measure of HumanX’s commercial impact will be how those introductions develop into AI deployments, business partnerships, and investment activity.
For Europe’s AI ecosystem, the significance of the Amsterdam gathering lies in bringing the people building AI technology into direct contact with those evaluating how to put it to work.
