NLP and data science could be so easy if all of our data came as clean and plain text. But in practice, a lot of it is hidden away in PDFs, Word documents, scans and other formats that have been a nightmare to work with. In this talk, I'll present a new and modular approach for building robust document understanding systems, using state-of-the-art models and the awesome Python ecosystem. I'll show you how you can go from PDFs to structured data and even build fully custom information extraction pipelines for your specific use case.

This fireside chat brings together leading voices from industry and open-source to explore how artificial intelligence is being meaningfully integrated into enterprise environments—beyond the buzzwords. Moderated by Alexander CS Hendorf, the conversation features Walid Mehanna (Chief Data Officer, Merck), Dr. Alexander Beck (CTO, Quoniam), and Ines Montani (co-founder explosion.ai, spaCy), who share their diverse perspectives from pharmaceuticals, finance, and AI tooling.

Together, they’ll explore the cultural, technical, and ethical dimensions of AI adoption in large organizations, the growing influence of open-source ecosystems, and the long-term vision required to build sustainable, human-centered AI systems. This session is designed for those who want to move past the hype and better understand what real-world innovation at scale looks like—and what it demands from leadership, infrastructure, and community.