Tech events in berlin

with Max Jendrall (OpenAI Codex Ambassador, Codex Community Events) · Pauline P. Narvas (Host, Codex Community Events)

A one-day community hackathon built around OpenAI's Codex and ChatGPT, running 10:00 to 18:00 across three tracks. Developer entries are judged on technical merit and the demo, GTM and Sales entries on the strategy, and Founder entries on a feature that solves a real problem. There is a standard track for anyone who does not fit one of the three. Hosted by Max Jendrall, a Berlin-based OpenAI Codex Ambassador, with Pauline P. Narvas, under Codex Community Events. Free, but registration is approval-gated and the exact address goes only to people who are accepted. Track leads are confirmed shortly before the day, and entrants can win a ticket to the official DevDay Exchange on 26 October. Why go: a build day with judging attached rather than another talk about agents. Best for developers and founders who want to ship something with Codex in a room of people doing the same.

A one-day build at Revent in Mitte with a concrete brief: small businesses either pay for expensive vertical software or make do with generic tools, so build an engine that adapts to the business instead. The worked example in the brief is one product that becomes gym class booking with a bike map, salon staff scheduling, or padel court booking depending on who describes their needs to it. Required stack: Stripe Connect, Supabase and AI. Demos have to show the problem, how the product adapts, how Stripe and Supabase carry it, and how the costs stay low. Ten hours, solo or in teams, open to developers, designers and founders. Cash prizes, platform credits, food and drinks throughout. Why go: a hackathon with a real commercial constraint rather than an open theme, and the two platforms are in the room. Best for full-stack builders and anyone prototyping vertical SaaS.

An afternoon co-working session at Merantix AI Campus for people who would rather build next to other engineers than alone. There is no programme: participants bring a project, say in one line what they are working on, and spend two and a half hours on it with coffee and the option of asking the person next to them. The ninth edition continues a quietly reliable Berlin series. For software and AI engineers, researchers, technical founders and tinkerers. Free with registration, at the Wedding campus. Why go: it is the cheapest way to turn a Monday afternoon of solo work into a few new contacts, and the one-line intro means you actually find out who is worth talking to. Best for solo founders, freelancers and anyone whose side project has stalled for lack of company rather than lack of ideas.

The second Berlin edition of Near Legion, run by AI Agents Berlin at Circuit in Kreuzberg. The evening looks at autonomous agents that need to hold assets, pay for things or prove what they did, and at what the NEAR stack offers for that. The format is short technical talks followed by open discussion and building time rather than a panel. For AI engineers, agent builders, Web3 developers, founders and researchers, including people entirely new to NEAR. Free with registration. Why go: agents that move money are the next obvious step and also the one nobody has a settled pattern for, so an evening of people arguing about it in public is more useful than documentation. Best for agent builders who have hit the payments-and-identity wall, and for Web3 developers looking for a use case with current demand.

Scout24 and OpenAI run a working session on moving from a product question to something testable, using ChatGPT and Codex on everyday product work — discovery through to prototype. Participants work a practical product challenge against sample data, try the tools themselves, and spend time on how to judge what comes back. Hands-on until 20:00 at the Scout24 Community Hub, then networking with food and drinks. Aimed at product managers and builders who already know Codex and want the next step; bring a laptop, setup instructions are sent in advance. Free, but places are limited and entry is by short questionnaire with participation confirmed by the hosts. Why go: hands-on AI sessions for PMs are usually vendor demos; this one has a real product challenge, an in-house team that ships at scale, and OpenAI in the room. Best for PMs past the curiosity stage.

London's inward-investment programme brings a cohort of UK fintech and green-tech scale-ups to Berlin to meet German industry leaders, corporates and investors, hosted at Industrious in Mitte. The useful thing here is the direction of travel in both senses. If you are German-side, it is a curated room of companies that have already found product-market fit at home and are looking for partners here. If you are scaling into Germany yourself, it is a free evening with people doing exactly that right now. Free to attend, registration through Eventbrite. Why go: cross-border scaling advice is usually generic, and this room is specific — a named cohort, a named market, and the trade-body people who handle the paperwork standing next to them. Best for fintech and climate founders with a cross-channel plan, and for German corporates sourcing partners.

The thirteenth Berlin Deep Tech Nexus, back at TU Berlin for the new semester and held in a 138-seat lecture hall in the university's High-Frequency Engineering building. Hosted by Science & Startups at TU Berlin. An impulse talk from TU Berlin on research-to-application pathways, then short spotlights from four startups: Soltrac on deployable wings for satellites, Ciyano on fossil-free chemicals from biomaterials, VIRAS on manufacturer-independent robotics platforms, and Open Radio Systems on programmable radio infrastructure. A research spotlight from TU Berlin's Chair in Space Engineering covers the gEICko project, a capture kit for docking uncooperative spacecraft. Curated networking follows. Free; registration required and subject to approval. The organisers are explicit that there are no sales decks and no pitching pressure. Why go: space, advanced materials, robotics and radio in one room, with researchers and PhD students alongside founders rather than after them. Best for technical founders, researchers weighing a spin-out, and anyone hiring deep-tech talent.

The October edition of Avomind's recurring founder meetup, themed on how founders actually use technology to stay ahead and keep experimenting, with a Halloween turn to it given the date. Held at Mindspace on Kurfürstendamm. The format is a themed networking evening rather than a talks programme, with tiered tickets from around seventeen euros. Why go: Avomind has run this long enough that the regulars are a real network rather than a new crowd each month, and a paid ticket at this level filters for people who intended to come. Best if you are building a founder network in the city and want a west-side room — most of Berlin's startup events sit in Mitte, Kreuzberg or Wedding, and this one does not.

A morning session at Merantix AI Campus on where machine learning is genuinely changing how materials get discovered, sourced and recycled, as opposed to where it is mostly a slide in a pitch deck. Expect founders and researchers working on materials discovery, industrial processes and circularity, a short set of inputs, and breakfast-table conversation with the kind of people who know which claims hold. Free with registration; the AI Breakfast series fills quickly. Why go: materials and industrial process work is where applied AI has the least hype and some of the most defensible value, and a breakfast format with a short input section puts you in conversation rather than in an audience. Best for deep-tech founders, industrial and manufacturing people assessing where to invest engineering effort, and investors trying to separate real materials claims from the rest.

FemTechConf's two-day EMEA summit brings roughly 1,200 executives, engineers, product managers, founders, data scientists and designers to smartvillage Berlin. Eighteen-plus speakers, workshop tracks and a closing evening at the AWS Tower. It is one of the largest women-in-tech gatherings in Europe and a serious hiring and network event rather than a token one — the employer presence is the point as much as the programme. Tickets from around 80 euros. Why go: at this scale the corridor is the conference, and 1,200 people across seniority levels and functions is a genuinely different network from what a monthly meetup builds. Best if you are hiring, job-hunting or looking for mentors and sponsors rather than another talk; the AWS Tower evening is where most of the useful conversations will actually happen.

Venture Café Berlin's weekly Thursday Gathering at CIC Berlin: a programme of talks and sessions, demo tables where founders show what they are building, and several hours of open networking across founders, investors, corporates and researchers. The gathering starts at 17:00 and is free and open to everyone, with no application or approval step. The programme for each edition is published on the Venture Café community page closer to the date; the consistency of the crowd is what makes it worth putting in the calendar regardless. Why go: one evening a week where the Berlin ecosystem reliably shows up in one building, which makes it a default rather than a plan. Best for founders raising or hiring, and for anyone new to the city who needs twenty short conversations rather than one scheduled meeting.

Three days with the people who build Qubes OS, the security-by-compartmentalisation operating system that runs each task in its own isolated virtual machine. The summit mixes development talks, workshops and hacking time at Refugio Berlin in Neukölln. It is the project's main annual gathering, and the room is mostly contributors, packagers and downstream users rather than a vendor audience. A detailed schedule follows once the speaker lineup is fixed. Friday 09:30 through Sunday 15:00. On-site attendance needs a paid Pretix ticket; a virtual ticket and livestream are free. Why go: one of the few places where an unusual security architecture is discussed in public, at length, by the people maintaining it. Best for security engineers and privacy researchers.

A five-hour Saturday-afternoon hackathon run by Kiez & Kin with support from Lovable, hosted by Sarah Burgess and Danial Darabi. Short-format and ship-something-today rather than a weekend build: come with an idea or join a team on the day, build with whatever stack you like, show it at the end. No brief, judging panel or prize list has been published beyond Lovable's involvement, so treat it as a build-and-demo afternoon rather than a competition. Free, registration on Luma, and the exact location is shared on sign-up. Why go: Berlin's hackathon calendar is dominated by corporate weekend events with sponsor tracks, and a short community one on a Saturday afternoon is a much lower-commitment way to actually finish something. Best for people who want to try vibe-coding tools with others around rather than alone.

Nullcon's fifth Berlin edition runs five days: three days of hands-on training from 2 to 4 November, then a two-day conference on 5 and 6 November, alongside CTFs in the Flag Arena and topic villages. The programme is research-led rather than vendor-led. Confirmed sessions include Lukas Maar on exploiting a stale IOMMU TLB for privilege escalation on Qualcomm-based mobile devices, Emanuele Barbeno on breaking Home Assistant at Pwn2Own, Nick Aleks on compromised autonomous drones attacking ground control stations, and Lindsay Kaye of HUMAN Security on industrialised abuse at mobile scale. Benjamin Bannier and Christian Kreibich present the Zeek open-source network monitor. Paid: student pass EUR 249, individual conference pass EUR 649 at the standard rate, three-day training pass EUR 2,399. Venue: Maritim proArte Hotel Berlin, Friedrichstrasse 151. Why go: it is the most technical security room in Berlin this autumn, built on original exploitation research rather than conference-circuit keynotes. Best for security engineers, red teamers and researchers who want to see the work before it is published.

A full day at the Brazilian Embassy in Mitte on how international partnerships actually drive innovation, with dialogue and networking between the Brazilian and German innovation ecosystems. 10:00 to 16:30 at Wallstrasse 57. Hosted by the Embassy of Brazil in Berlin. Free, but registration is a request rather than a ticket: the embassy states that spaces are limited and that you should wait for a separate confirmation email before treating your place as confirmed. Build that into your plans if you are travelling for it. Why go: Berlin gets plenty of bilateral tech events and very few with Brazil, so this is a different set of people from the usual room. Best for founders and investors with Latin American markets or partners on their roadmap.

Silicon Allee's first-Tuesday morning meetup, at St. Oberholz in Kreuzberg. No agenda, no talks, no pitching — two hours of open conversation over coffee, with the whole St. Oberholz Kreuzberg space given over to the group. Silicon Allee has run Berlin's English-language startup network since 2011 and now backs deep tech founders alongside Fraunhofer HHI, funding teams working in AI, photonics, quantum and wireless. The room reflects that: founders mid-build, engineers, investors and people newly arrived in the city, rather than a programmed audience. Free, 9:00 to 11:00. Enter through the main cafe entrance in the Innenhof and look for the Silicon Allee poster. Coffee and snacks are bought at the counter. Why go: the most reliable low-effort way into Berlin's startup scene, and the one recurring room where turning up alone with nothing to pitch is the norm. Best if you are new to the city or between projects.

with Badr Alkhamissi (PhD Student, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne)

A 45-minute research talk from the BLISS AI Speaker Series, with Badr Alkhamissi, a PhD student at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, on what it would take for artificial intelligence to be human-like, and what current systems do instead. Hosted by BLISS Berlin e.V. at TU Berlin's chemistry institute on Straße des 17. Juni. Talk first, then open discussion with Berlin's machine-learning community over free drinks and pizza. Built for students, PhD candidates, academic researchers and industry people doing ML research, but open to anyone following current AI work. RSVP on Luma is required for entry and doors close at 19:15. Photography may take place. Why go: this opens the winter series and sets its register, a working researcher on open problems rather than a product pitch. Best for ML researchers, PhD students and engineers who want the room where Berlin's research crowd actually argues.

A role-play workshop on who owns data, run by The Data Tank with the European Citizen Science Association as part of Berlin Science Week, at the Museum für Naturkunde. After a short warm-up everyone takes a role — citizen, researcher, startup, city government or AI company — and negotiates through scenarios running from community environmental monitoring to AI training datasets: who owns the data, who gets access, who gets credit, and what breaks when a project scales. The arguments then feed a fireside chat with people working on European data governance and research infrastructures, and it closes with networking and drinks. No data or policy background needed. Free, 16:45 to 19:00, in English. Two of the three ticket releases were already showing sold out. Why go: if you collect or train on public data, this is a cheap way to hear the objections before a regulator or a community makes them. Best for AI founders and data leads; skip it if you want a lecture.

Robots are leaving the factory floor for desks, kitchens and homes, and foundation models, cheaper hardware and faster prototyping have put consumer robotics within reach of small teams. Speedinvest and co-hosts bring together the founders, researchers and investors building and backing it, at MotionLab.Berlin — the city's hardware prototyping workshop, which is the right room for this. Doors and food at 18:00, a short thesis talk and fireside at 18:30, then live demos from early-stage teams at 18:45 — robotic arms, desktop devices, home robots, companions, anything portable — and networking from 19:30. Showcase slots are open to early-stage hardware teams on request. Free. Why go: working demos you can put your hands on, in front of the people who fund hardware in Europe. Best for robotics and hardware founders, perception researchers, and angels who back physical products.

Working scientists from the life sciences, medicine, chemistry and materials, physics, mathematics, nanotechnology and climate science sit down with the engineers who build AI agents, around one question: what would it take for AI to speed up the science that matters most, and what is left for us to do. Explicitly not a lecture or a product demo. Most of the evening runs in small groups on four prompts — where AI already helps and where it fails in your field, what is missing between a capable model and a publishable result, which of your open problems are ready for an AI research loop now, and which to start on. The evening ends with a shortlist of real open problems, which becomes the brief for the full-day Claude Impact Lab that follows. Free, at CIC Berlin. Why go: it produces a work item rather than a panel recording. Best for researchers and AI engineers willing to commit to a problem afterwards.

with Serra Yosmaoglu (Founder, geospatial data layer, previously German Aerospace Center (DLR)) · Stephanie Jonkers (Engineer and product leader, previously Daimler, CARIAD, AWS) · Nicole Büttner (Founding Partner, Merantix Capital)

The stretch before day one: an idea that might not hold up, a co-founder you have not found, and a lot of decisions made on very little information. Two early-stage founders talk through that part honestly, moderated by Nicole Büttner, Founding Partner at Merantix Capital. Serra Yosmaoglu is building in the geospatial data layer and was a geospatial data scientist at the German Aerospace Center; Stephanie Jonkers has worked across radar signal processing, automotive AI at Daimler and CARIAD, and AWS, and is now exploring her own company. Coffee from 09:00, discussion and Q&A 09:15–10:15, networking to 11:00. Doors close 09:30 sharp. Free, at the AI Campus in Wedding. Why go: ideation-stage conversations are usually told backwards as success stories; this one is deliberately about what did not work. Best for engineers and researchers thinking about founding.

Two days on the overlap between research data infrastructure and AI, at the Weizenbaum Institute in Charlottenburg, running lunch-to-lunch across 5 and 6 November. The programme splits in two directions: research data management infrastructure built for AI, and AI applied to running that infrastructure. The call for participation took talk, poster and demo submissions through EasyChair, so the content is contributed rather than built around keynotes, and the speaker list was not published at the time of writing. The organising committee is Sonja Schimmler (Fraunhofer FOKUS, TU Berlin, Weizenbaum Institute), Christine Hennig (Fraunhofer FOKUS), Julia Michalsky (TU Berlin) and Leyla Jael Castro (ZB MED). A science slam closes the first evening. Registration runs through HIFIS; the main entrance and parking are wheelchair accessible. Why go: the people who hold Germany's research datasets talking about making them machine-usable, which sits upstream of a lot of applied AI work. Best for data engineers and anyone building on public research data. Not a founder-networking room.

Venture Café's weekly Berlin gathering, this edition built around deep-tech founders coming out of chemistry and materials labs. The structured networking block from 17:00 to 18:00 puts six startups in the room for booked one-to-one slots: Clean Ocean Coatings, COFion, PeelBack, Waste2Watt, MANA.energy and SCORE. Founders taking part include Barbora Balcarova (CEO, MANA.energy), Hiba Bensalah (Waste2Watt), Anna Maria Dominic (PeelBack) and Christina Linke (Clean Ocean Coatings). Running alongside: Startup Incubator Berlin's UX testing, demo tables with 20 Korean startups via GMEP 2026 with betahausX and Vertical, and open networking until 20:00. Free, registration required. The one-to-one slots book separately through a calendar link, and the demo tables are already full for this date. Why go: the science-founder end of Berlin's ecosystem rarely gets a room of its own, and the one-to-one format means you talk to the six teams instead of watching them pitch. Best for deep-tech founders hunting a commercial cofounder, and for anyone sourcing materials or climate hardware.

Startup Incubator Berlin's demo day, part of HWR Berlin's Career Week and folded into the Venture Café evening at CIC. Two tracks run in parallel from 17:00 to 20:00. In Wildenbruch, UX testing opens at 17:30 — you try the teams' prototypes and give feedback. In Persius, info tables run first, then an introduction to the SIB and HWR entrepreneurship programmes at 17:30, startup pitches from 18:00 to 18:50, and guided tours at 19:00 and 19:30. SIPOZA, Mini Movers Club and WorkEnabler each pitch and then sit for a short interview about their time in the incubator. Marvin Göldner, co-lead of the incubator, and Prof. Hannes Kübel speak. Free. Attendees are asked to register for Venture Café Berlin as well. Why go: three student-founded companies at a stage where feedback still changes the product, and the UX testing slot is a real chance to be useful rather than just present. Best for anyone who mentors early teams, and for students weighing up the incubator.

with Phil Schwarick (Host, Business Angels Club Berlin-Brandenburg e.V.)

Six medical-technology AI startups pitch to a room of investors and healthcare people, under the theme From Tech to Trust. It is run jointly by the Business Angels Club Berlin-Brandenburg and DIN, Germany's standards institute, which sets the angle: patient safety, data protection and the AI Act are treated as conditions for adoption, not obstacles. The pitches cover prevention, diagnostics, clinical decision support and patient monitoring, with a jury prize and an audience prize, and around them sit a panel on what AI must satisfy before clinicians trust it and a success story from a DIN SPEC project. Food, drinks and networking follow. Free, registration required. Book the on-site ticket rather than the livestream one if you want the room; the exact address is shared after registration. Why go: regulation is where most healthcare-AI startups stall, and this is a rare evening where the standards body is in the room instead of being talked about. Best for medtech founders, health investors and anyone taking a clinical AI product to market.

with Alexander Libman (Professor, SCRIPTS, Freie Universität Berlin) · Jakob Hensing (Researcher, Global Public Policy Institute) · Roderich Kiesewetter (Member of the Bundestag, CDU) + 2 more

A panel on how automated disinformation, synthetic media and algorithmically sorted information spaces are redrawing political power — and what that does to democratic debate, security and public order. The line-up is the reason to go: Alexander Libman of SCRIPTS at Freie Universität Berlin, Jakob Hensing of the Global Public Policy Institute, Bundestag member Roderich Kiesewetter of the CDU, and Julia Smirnova of CeMAS, which monitors disinformation campaigns professionally. Gesa Ufer moderates. It is the second instalment of the Berlin Science Week series AI, Power and Societal Control, and it deliberately mixes political science, policy practice and parliamentary politics rather than keeping to one of them. Free, registration required. A T-coil induction loop is available. Why go: most AI-and-democracy panels in Berlin pair two academics with a journalist. This one has a sitting MP and a working disinformation analyst in the same room, which is where the argument gets concrete. Best for policy, security and trust-and-safety people.

with Yoshua Bengio (Turing Award laureate, Mila) · Stephanie Hare (Broadcaster and researcher, BBC) · Sibylle Anderl (Head of science section, DIE ZEIT) + 1 more

Berlin Science Week opens its Festival Centre at Haus der Kulturen der Welt with ninety minutes on what AI is doing to science and public life. The centrepiece is Yoshua Bengio, Turing Award laureate and one of the architects of modern deep learning, in conversation with BBC presenter Stephanie Hare on engineering safe, sovereign AI and why industry self-regulation may not be enough. A second panel, Lebenswerte KI, puts Sibylle Anderl of DIE ZEIT alongside transformation psychologist Irina Nalis on how AI reshapes human judgement and agency. Festival Director Christian Rauch and HKW Director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung give the welcomes. Entry is free, but you have to book a 3-Day Festival Centre Pass to secure a seat. The Bengio session runs in English, the second in German. Why go: Bengio rarely speaks in Berlin, and this is the clearest hour on frontier-AI risk you will get without a conference ticket. Best for researchers, policy people and founders working anywhere near AI governance.

with Kazik Pogoda (Host, Claude Community Events) · Bradley C Royes (Host, Foresight Institute Berlin AI Node) · Keith Patarroyo (Host, Claude Community Events)

A full-day build at CIC Berlin where domain scientists and AI engineers sit side by side and try to turn a real open research problem into a working agent. The problems come from the Claude Conversation held in Berlin earlier in the autumn, where local scientists named what they most want AI help with. Teams form around those, then spend six to eight hours building a research loop: an agent that reads the literature, writes and runs code, checks its own results and keeps going. Claude Community mentors work alongside the teams, and every team demos at the end. Free, but places are by application and the hosts select participants. Bring a laptop and a console account; teams leave with an open-source loop on GitHub. Why go: most AI-for-science events are talks about the idea. This one puts the scientist who owns the problem next to the engineer who builds the harness for a day, which is the part that usually never happens.

An evening in the GLS Campus auditorium in Prenzlauer Berg, hosted by the Berlin office of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, on a field where model errors touch fundamental rights directly: AI in the justice system. The discussion covers decision support, case-file analysis, explainability and what guarantees a constitutional state should demand before such tools enter proceedings. Aimed at justice and public administration professionals, legal tech, academia, policymakers and the AI community. Free to attend.

with Laura Tacho (Senior Principal Technologist, AWS) · Bhavana Hindupur (Staff Software Engineer, Meta) · Darragh Curran (CTO, Fin) + 2 more

Two days for engineering leaders, back at the Estrel in Neukölln. The 2026 programme is organised around what AI adoption is doing to engineering organisations: measuring and proving results, managing leadership expectations that have run ahead of reality, high-stakes calls on org structure and tooling, and holding stretched teams together through it. Speakers include Laura Tacho (Senior Principal Technologist, AWS), Darragh Curran (CTO, Fin), Bhavana Hindupur (Staff Software Engineer, Meta), Mathieu Bastian (Principal AI Engineer, GetYourGuide), Becki Wordsworth (CTO, Meela) and Jasmine James Fuller (Senior Engineering Manager, Block). Alongside the talks: free 80-minute workshops, table talks, speaker office hours and coaching. Standard tickets €1,599 plus VAT, sold in waves; group rates from €1,199. The free DirectorPlus add-on is limited to Heads of, Directors, VPs and CTOs. Why go: one of the few rooms where engineering managers compare notes on AI mandates with people who have had to deliver them. Best for EMs, directors and CTOs rather than individual contributors.

A TEDxBerlin salon on what AI does to the job of leading an organisation: which decisions can sensibly be delegated to a system, what changes about accountability when they are, and how teams respond when their manager's judgement is partly machine-assisted. Salons are smaller and more conversational than the main TEDxBerlin event, with speakers staying for the discussion. For leaders, transformation leads, technologists and the TEDx community. Tickets required, with early-bird and student rates; the venue is announced closer to the date.

A full-day Bitkom conference on how AI is reshaping the software industry. Sessions tackle where value is actually created once code can be generated at speed, how Germany and Europe stay competitive as software and AI locations, and which skills and policy choices that requires. Draws participants from industry, politics and research. Hosted by Deutsche Bahn at the EUREF Campus in Schöneberg.

An evening on what the research loop looks like once AI touches every step of it — hypothesis, simulation, experiment. The framing from the hosts is that in a decade "AI for science" will just be called science, and the interesting question is what the next version of the loop actually is. The stated ground: generative and foundation models for molecules and materials, closing the loop between prediction and experiment, and the gap between benchmark performance and results that hold up at the bench. Technical talks from people building these systems, with real failure modes alongside what works, then time to dig in with peers. Speakers and agenda are still to be announced. Free, at the AI Campus in Wedding, which hosts 80+ AI teams. Why go: one of the few Berlin rooms where ML researchers and wet-lab scientists are both present. Best for applied scientists and ML engineers working on molecules, materials or simulation.

A specialist conference at the Maritim proArte Hotel in Mitte on the question now holding up most AI projects in regulated industries: how do you evidence conformity when the system changes its own behaviour? It covers AI Act obligations, risk classification, documentation duties, data protection and the practical division of labour between business, legal and IT. Run by COMPUTAS Fachkonferenzen with ISiCO GmbH, with an optional group dinner. For compliance, legal and data protection professionals. The regular rate is 640 euros net.

with Mark Branson (Präsident, BaFin) · Fritzi Köhler-Geib (Vorstandsmitglied, Deutsche Bundesbank) · Steffen Jentsch (CEO, Solaris) + 3 more

Bitkom's conference on the digitalisation of German financial services, at KOSMOS on Karl-Marx-Allee, 09:30 to 18:45. The agenda and speaker list are not published yet. What is public is the partner line-up, and it tells you who will be in the room: DKB, ING and LBBW on the bank side, SAP and swisscom on infrastructure, and IDnow, Nect and Signicat on identity and onboarding. Expect digital identity, KYC and core-banking modernisation to dominate. Conducted in German. Ticket prices are not shown on the registration page. Deutsche Bahn offers discounted travel for attendees, and booked tickets cannot be cancelled. Why go: this is where German banks, insurers and the vendors who sell to them talk to each other, which makes it useful if financial institutions are your market. Fintech founders chasing a bank partnership will get more from the partner floor than the stage. Worth checking the programme page before committing, since the price is not public.

with Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln (President, WZB) · Martin Krzywdzinski (Research group head, WZB / Weizenbaum Institute) · Moritz Heuberger (Member of the Bundestag, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) + 2 more

A panel at the WZB on what AI is doing to how work is organised, how performance gets measured and who ends up with the opportunities. What makes it worth an evening is that the five people on stage come from genuinely different places: WZB president Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln and Martin Krzywdzinski, who runs the WZB's globalisation, work and production group and directs at the Weizenbaum Institute; Green MP Moritz Heuberger; Jochem Freyer, who chairs the employment agency in Frankfurt (Oder) and sees the labour market from the administrative side; and Nadine Müller of ver.di, for the union view. Gesa Ufer moderates, and questions follow. Part of the Berlin Science Week series AI, Power and Societal Control. In German. Free, registration required; Room A300, and the building is step-free. Why go: the labour-market consequences of AI usually get argued at conferences by people selling something. Here it is a researcher, an MP, a job-centre chief and a union official, which is a far better test of the claims.

with Pavel Izmailov (Member of Technical Staff, Anthropic)

A 45-minute research talk from the BLISS AI Speaker Series, with Pavel Izmailov, Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, on how reasoning emerges in language models: what pretraining puts there, and what post-training actually changes. Hosted by BLISS Berlin e.V. at TU Berlin's chemistry institute on Straße des 17. Juni. Talk first, then open discussion with Berlin's machine-learning community over free drinks and pizza. Aimed at students, PhD candidates, academic researchers and industry people doing ML research. RSVP on Luma is required for entry and doors close at 19:15. Photography may take place. Why go: reasoning is the capability every lab claims to have improved and almost nobody explains mechanistically. Izmailov works on it inside a frontier lab and is speaking to a research audience, not a buyer. Best for ML researchers and engineers working on training or evaluation.

Two days of applied-computing workshops at GFaI's own hall in Adlershof, Berlin's science and technology park. GFaI is an applied research institute, so the sessions lean towards demonstrable work: sensor and acoustic analysis, machine vision, industrial AI and the transfer problem of getting a method out of a lab and into a production line. Useful to researchers, industrial R and D teams, developers and public-sector organisations with a technical mandate. Programme and registration are on the GFaI events page.

A practitioner-level session from SIBB on moving AI agents out of the experiment stage and into concrete workflows at small and mid-sized companies. It covers where agents already create value, which processes suit agent-based automation, how the technical and organisational integration actually goes, and how a personal AI assistant turns into an enterprise system. There is an open stage where attendees present their own use cases in five to ten minutes. Hosted at the Merantix AI Campus in Wedding.

with Rory McCune (Speaker — Kubernetes persistence exploitation, Datadog) · Alejandro Rusell (Speaker — GitHub OIDC vulnerabilities, Miro) · Kolja Grassmann (Speaker — SwitchBot smartlock hacking, Neodyme) + 2 more

The community-run security conference: a workshop day on 12 November and a talks day on 13 November at CIC Berlin. This year's programme leans heavily into where AI and security collide — AI-assisted secret leaks, AI-driven malware generation, benchmarking AI web penetration testing — alongside Kubernetes persistence, GitHub OIDC and IoT hardware hacking. Speakers come from Datadog, Miro, Atos, Neodyme, Trendyol and SafeBreach. Talks day from 99 euros, 49 for students; the workshop day is ticketed separately.

The RKW Kompetenzzentrum's annual event at Quadriga Campus in Mitte, aimed at small and mid-sized firms trying to get past the pilot stage. The programme pairs credible case studies from German SMEs with sessions on choosing the right process, data readiness, workforce skills and funding routes, and is candid about what has not worked. For entrepreneurs, managing directors, specialists and stakeholders from business, policy and academia. Free to attend with registration.

Three days at KHSB in Berlin on AI in social services, a sector where automated decisions land on people with little power to contest them. The programme brings international researchers and practitioners together on casework support, documentation burden, algorithmic assessment and the ethics of deploying models in care and welfare settings. Of real use to anyone building public-sector or social-impact AI who wants to hear from the practitioners who will have to live with it. Free of charge.

with Trevor Lohrbeer (Host, AI Safety Berlin) · Manuel Allgaier (Host, AI Safety Berlin)

A full working day rather than an evening talk: AI Safety Berlin takes over the Æthos space on the third floor of CIC Berlin and runs open coworking from 10:00 to 18:00, with the community dropping in around it. The fixed points are an 11:00 accountability group for people trying to move into AI safety work — reviewing training and career resources, making a plan, committing out loud to a next step — then introductions at 13:00, lunch at 13:15, and an afternoon talk still to be confirmed. Come for lunch only, lunch plus the afternoon, or the whole day. Free. The coworking tickets need host approval; newcomers are explicitly welcome and the hosts collect people from the lobby. Why go: Berlin's AI safety scene is small and mostly online, and this is the one standing slot where researchers, governance people and career-changers are in the same room long enough to actually get something done. Best if you are working in the field or seriously trying to enter it.

A conference on Germany's data centre strategy, convening business, politics and academia. The agenda is about implementation rather than ambition: what has to happen in the near term, with specific attention to power supply capacity, energy costs and the regulatory requirements that decide whether German digital infrastructure stays competitive. Framed around digitalisation, AI and digital sovereignty, with a networking reception after the day's programme. At the Bavarian state representation in Mitte.

The Open District Hub's autumn forum on the future of urban districts, with inputs on policy, AI and sector coupling. The audience comes from energy systems, smart city and urban tech — a field where the interesting problems are less technical than regulatory and commercial. At FORUM Factory in Kreuzberg, tickets from around 107 euros.

Berlin's edition of World Usability Day, the annual UX and usability community gathering coordinated by German UPA. One of the few sizeable dates in the year aimed squarely at usability and human-centred design practitioners rather than product managers. The venue had not been published when this was listed and the end time comes from a secondary listing, so confirm details on the organiser's page before travelling.

with Dr. Julian Boha (Strategic AI and Innovation, Siemens AG) · Holger Maibaum (Director Data Analytics & AI, Capgemini Deutschland Holding) · Antonia Zock (Digital Transformation, Capgemini Deutschland Holding) + 1 more

Merantix Momentum and HANNOVER MESSE on getting AI past the pilot stage in industry: production, logistics and energy, with startup showcases rather than slideware. The afternoon opens with a panel of Merantix Momentum and AI startups, then runs rotating 30-minute expert sessions and you pick three rounds. Dr. Julian Boha of Siemens AG leads on strategic AI, Holger Maibaum and Antonia Zock of Capgemini on data analytics and digital transformation, Stephan Schnieber of IBM Deutschland on hybrid cloud and enterprise AI. Arrival 15:30, panel 15:50, expert rounds until 18:00, then drinks and fingerfood. Why go: the rotating format means you actually talk to the Siemens, Capgemini and IBM people instead of watching them. Best for industrial AI builders and anyone selling into German manufacturing.

Venture Café's weekly Berlin gathering, this week with a panel on what quantum computing does to Bitcoin's cryptography. Race Against the Machine runs 18:45 to 20:00 with Fabian Jahr (open source contributor), Matthias Mrozewski (Associate Professor for International Entrepreneurship, ESCP Europe) and Wadim Wormsbecher (Senior Innovation Developer, Bundesdruckerei-Gruppe), on where the cryptographic risk actually sits and which mitigations are real. Before that, 17:30 to 18:30, ESCP Business School runs Pitching for Impact, with AI pre-seed startups presenting solutions and business models. Demo and info tables and open networking run across the whole evening. Free, registration required. The demo tables are a no-hard-sales zone. Why go: a specific technical question put to people who work on the primitives rather than the price, plus a pre-seed AI pitch session in the same three hours. Best for security and crypto engineers, and for pre-seed founders who want to see what is getting backed.

The kickoff of the Pre-Incubation Club, a workshop format for very early-stage founders built around deliberately taking an idea apart rather than polishing the pitch for it. Run by Science & Startups, the joint startup service of the Berlin University Alliance, from the Fraunhofer HHI Lanolinfabrik site in Charlottenburg. Free.

with Ferdinand Mühlhäuser (Managing Director, Founder Institute Germany)

The November edition of the guided founder and co-founder networking series at the KERB food hall at Potsdamer Platz, for pre-seed founders plus the advisors and mentors who circle them. Guided rather than free-for-all, which is what makes co-founder searching at an event like this actually work. Hosted by Founder Institute Germany with Softup Technologies, Orrick and Qonto. Free.

A two-day student-and-builder conference hosted at CODE University in Neukölln, capped at 300 seats and selected by application. The mix is deliberate: developers and designers alongside founders, investors and companies, with workshops and project showcases rather than a keynote-heavy agenda. For anyone recruiting technical early-career talent in Berlin it is one of the better rooms, and for students it is unusually direct access to people who are hiring. Applications close when the seats go.