What the AI & Automation Talk at Politecnico di Milano Had to Say
A full day of use cases, one after another, spanning industries from energy to fashion and from banking to manufacturing. On 24 September, the Aula De Carli at Politecnico di Milano hosted the AI & Automation Talk, an event organised by the Observatory on Artificial Intelligence and the Observatory on Intelligent Business Process Automation, bringing together real-world machine learning and artificial intelligence projects presented by the teams that developed them.
The S2E team followed the event from the audience with a specific goal: to understand how Italian companies are actually bringing AI into their processes, beyond the announcements.
The most evident common thread throughout the day was governance. More than one presentation addressed the issue of controlling and measuring AI systems, raising very practical questions about the cost of artificial intelligence operating without clear rules. Alongside this, agentic AI emerged mainly in its most pragmatic form, built around guardrails, deterministic workflows and orchestration between people and automation. A third key theme was data quality, with examples focused on dataset management and even the use of synthetic users to test decisions before they are implemented.
These are familiar topics for S2E. Seeing them at the centre of discussions among companies from such diverse industries confirms the relevance of the direction S2E has taken.