AI, data and cybersecurity in business. The major topics at MakoDays 2026

At Insights a year ago, we were writing about MakoDays as a roadmap for companies wrestling with digital development. This year's driving idea, Past the pilots. Into the returns, moved the conversation onward to the moment when an AI solution emerges from the test phase and should start contributing to the company's bottom line. The setting also changed. While MakoDays 2025 was held at our HQ, this year we hosted the event in the post-industrial interiors of the Vienna House by Wyndham Andel's Lodz hotel.

The conference was opened by our CEO, Dariusz Głażewski, followed by a welcome to our city from First Deputy Mayor Adam Pustelnik. Piotr Ignaczak, our CTO then gave a presentation setting out the current state of AI. The panel that came next zeroed in on The AI need for speed. AI ethics expert Professor Katarzyna De Lazari-Radek, Vice Rector of Internationalisation at the University of Łódź (UoŁ) led a discussion with Adam Pustelnik, Mirek Sopek, PhD, founder of MakoLab and co-founder and CEO of Quantum B, and Professor Mariusz E. Sokołowicz of UoŁ.

The keynote speaker was the next to step into the spotlight. Professor Sören Auer, Director of the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology (TIB), Professor of Data Science and Digital Libraries at Leibniz University Hannover, founder of Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) and co-founder of DBpedia, took Beyond LLMs as his topic, addressing neurosymbolic and agentic AI as a foundation of the intelligent enterprise.

Data was a separate strand of the programme and it was handled by two MakoLab experts.

In a talk entitled Keep up or wise up, Jacek Popko, our Head of AI Services, probed decision intelligence in the AI era, an area where MakoLab is building a semantic layer from ontologies and knowledge graphs. That, in turn, means that generative AI answers and analytics are not only grounded in a company's data rather than guesswork, but are also explainable.

Mateusz Kijowski, Head of Data Analytics and Engineering at MakoLab Consulting, took the audience From data to decisions, exploring self-service business intelligence (BI), an approach where a company's teams leverage data and reports independently.

After lunch, companies using AI in practice took to the stage to demonstrate their processes.

• Identt: Head of Digital Identity Aleksandra Nowak zoomed in on identity verification in an age of fraud, ranging from visual document analysis to digital identity.
• Renault Polska: Mateusz Rakusa-Suszczewski, IS/IT Director for CEE Region, led the audience Beyond the buzz, examining how to turn the potential of AI into business value at enterprise scale. This was his second year running as a MakoDays speaker.
• PKO Leasing: Chief Product Owners Agnieszka Walczak-Karbowska and Marek Obuchowski presented a case study, Invisible AI, involving content moderation on the automarket.pl platform. The platform, which is owned by PKO Leasing, accepts vehicle listings not just from dealers alone, but from all its users.
• LSAS: IT Manager Piotr Jaczyński took the aviation sector as his example to illustrate an AI-driven, human-in-the-loop security operations centre (SOC) where people remain part of the decision-making process.

The second panel of the day, Data. AI. Cybersec: Three rings of power. Who actually controls them?, was moderated by Szymon Augustyniak, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Smart Tech RE:view. The panellists were Tadeusz Kifner, Interdisciplinary Pomeranian Center for Digital Medicine (IP_CMC) at the Medical University of Gdańsk, MakoLab's Dariusz Głażewski, Wojciech Zieliński, CIO of Sklepy Komfort S.A. and Bogusław Święcicki, Group ICT Manager at Bakels Group. Digital medicine, commerce, industry and IT came together to offer four views on the question constituting the title of the discussion.

The programme continued with Dr Mirek Sopek, who brought another question to the audience, Can quantum save cybersecurity? and scrutinising quantum technology in the AI age as both threat and shield at one and the same time.

In Which clock are you on?, Dominik Łubasz and Maria Dymitruk of Lubasz and Partners Attorneys-in-Law, looked at ten regulatory deadlines affecting AI. Piotr Ignaczak returned to the stage for the final talk of the day, An anatomy of cybersec resilience for 2027 and beyond.

The MakoDays 2026 networking zone, Łódź you like to connect, was active in parallel to the main stage all day, as were the individual, speed consulting sessions run by MakoLab experts, where conference participants could bring us their challenges for fast and effective consultation. In the evening, our MakoDays community moved to the iconic Stare Kino in Ogrody Geyera (Old Cinema, Geyer Gardens) for an exquisite dinner and extended conversations.

Our Head of Communications, Miron Niewiadomski, opened day two and a live voting that drew the room into a discussion on companies' AI-readiness. A panel chaired by Sabina Brożek-Rzewuska, Team Leader at Antal Market Research, Antal, turned to a series of reports from Antal in partnership with MakoLab as a primary reference for a discussion on AI deployment when The technology is there, but what stage of AI-readiness have organisations reached?

The Cyber Box challenge at MakoDays 2026 was a simulation game involving teams of participants working together to respond to a cyberattack. It combined elements of escape rooms, augmented reality and support from an AI assistant. The teams had 120 minutes to carry out their mission to stop the cyberattack before it was too late. Racing against the clock, they had to solve puzzles, analyse clues and make decisions.

The formula reflects MakoLab's underlying principle when preparing the game. Security isn't just about technology. It's also about people, processes and judgement.

From trends in AI development, via data-driven decision-making and implementation in real companies, to team responses to a simulated attack, this year's MakoDays took the participants on a journey through the successive stages of one core challenge. How do we introduce technology into an organisation and measure its results?

We would like to express our thanks to all the speakers, partners and participants who came together to form the MakoDays 2026 community. We're already looking forward to seeing you again next time!

Which of the topics are a concern for your organisation? If you're planning to implement AI, if you want to leverage your company's data more effectively or if you want to reinforce your cybersecurity, then bring the challenges you're facing to MakoLab's experts for analysis and to explore your next steps and their potential.