Main Stage

Opening remarks from the team at Gothenburg Tech Week!

Software, AI and advanced computing are transforming both the car and the industry behind it. Drawing on Volvo Cars’ transformation, Alwin Bakkenes explores what this shift demands from established automotive companies and how Sweden’s strengths in engineering, safety and industrial collaboration could help secure a leading role.

Sweden already has several structural advantages, industrial capability, digital maturity, strong research, public-sector data, clean energy and credible AI institutions but leadership will depend on turning them into faster adoption, investment, computing capacity, skills and clear rules.

Coretura was founded in 2025 by Volvo Group and Daimler Truck to build one software foundation for the commercial vehicle industry. Two owners with a century of history each, and a company with none of it. Coretura never had to fit AI into existing operations. It was built around AI from the start, choosing everything as code so tooling, governance and decisions could move at the same speed. Johan Lundén explores what this means for the organisation: why Coretura is deliberately flat, what it asks of leaders when employees can decide faster than any hierarchy can approve, and where it gets hard.

AI allows people to experiment, build and make decisions faster than most organisations are designed to handle. That changes what leadership needs to provide, from direction and trust to structures that can turn individual initiative into shared capability. Bringing together perspectives from building an AI-first company, organisational transformation and intrapreneurship, this panel explores how leaders can redesign ways of working, develop the right capabilities and move from scattered experimentation to lasting business value.

AI tools may be easy to test, but their true cost becomes harder to predict as usage grows. Token-based pricing, multiple tools and models, integration, data infrastructure and human oversight can turn a promising pilot into a significant operational investment. Organisations need to understand the cost of the entire AI-enabled process, not simply the price of the tool, and determine where AI creates enough value to justify scaling it.

AI may feel digital, but its growth depends on physical infrastructure. Data centres need vast amounts of reliable electricity, while industry and transport are electrifying at the same time. The challenge is not only producing enough power, but expanding the grid, shortening connection queues and deciding where new capacity should be built. This panel brings together perspectives from the energy system, data centre innovation and AI-powered grid planning to explore how Sweden can meet growing demand while keeping energy reliable, affordable and competitive.

A look back at the key ideas from the morning and a guide to the afternoon ahead, from lunch and networking to case-driven Tech Blueprint sessions and expert roundtables.

AI sovereignty goes beyond where data is stored. It is about retaining control over models, suppliers, costs and future choices. Berget AI and Klang.ai explore its strategic, political, economic and technical dimensions, what customers need in practice, and how policymakers should respond. The session also examines the role of open-weight models and open-source technology in building that control while meeting regulatory requirements.

Most AI transformations will not stall because of the technology. They will stall because teams are left to navigate the shift alone.

In this session, we share how we used role-specific cohorts, open failure-sharing forums and embedded team champions to transition our engineering and design teams into a new AI-powered operating model. Expect an honest look at what worked, what failed and the metrics that mattered, along with a practical blueprint for building AI capability across an organisation.

For one person, asking Claude is easy. Ask it what your biggest customer actually agreed to, why the pricing model looks the way it does or who should be allowed to see what, and things get complicated fast. This session explores what it takes to make “just ask Claude” work across an entire company: structured data, continuously captured knowledge, relationship-based permissions, shared processes and automation, all without compromising security.

Before the limit for many companies was how fast software could be written. Today, the limit is how fast decisions can be made and how quickly you learn from feedback. Building companies and products on agents requires a new operating model. The value created shifts away from product implementation toward knowledge of the problem it solves. This talk shares learnings from Staer on running a company on agents and explains what the future looks like for products.

Technology has never been more accessible. As AI spreads, the challenge is shifting from access to creating value at scale.

At Logivity, individual experimentation quickly opened new possibilities. It also revealed a challenge familiar from transport logistics: optimising individual parts does not necessarily optimise the whole. Different AI tools and approaches can create local value while remaining difficult to connect and scale.

Logivity CEO Jessica Öhrblad and Johan Berntsson, Chief Technology Officer, share how they are moving from individual AI use towards a shared organisational capability, without losing the speed and creativity of experimentation.

As generative AI begins to automate software engineering, new principles are emerging that also apply to Design and Make processes. AI-enabled development shifts the focus toward clear requirements, structured documentation, and rigorous validation to guide and verify generated outputs. While execution becomes increasingly automated, professional oversight remains critical to ensure reliability and quality. This talk will explore how these lessons can transform Design and Make workflows—enabling faster design execution with AI while elevating the importance of design and manufacturing specifications, thoughtful application of AI where it adds value, and expert-driven verification to build trust in AI-enabled workflows.

As AI moves from analysing information to interacting with the physical world, new opportunities are emerging across manufacturing and logistics. Susanne Timsjö shares ABB Robotics’ perspective on this shift, exploring how AI, software and robotics are converging to create more adaptive, autonomous and intelligent industrial systems, and what this means for the future of automation.

Physical AI must make sense of environments that are complex, unpredictable and rarely offer one objectively correct answer. For machines to act safely in the real world, they need more than large models and vast amounts of data. They need relevant data, continuous human feedback and reliable ways to evaluate how well they understand difficult situations.Daniel Langkilde explores what it takes to build AI systems that can perceive, learn and make better decisions in the physical world, and why human judgement remains essential as these systems scale.

Physical AI is moving intelligent systems beyond digital environments and into machines that operate in the real world. But scaling these systems across industry requires more than advanced robotics and powerful AI models. It depends on high-quality data, reliable performance, safety, infrastructure and the ability to integrate new capabilities into existing industrial environments. Susanne Timsjö and Daniel Langkilde explore what it will take to move Physical AI from promising applications to widespread industrial use.

The final reveal of the winning team from the GTW × Chalmers Tech Blueprint Hackathon. Over one week, multidisciplinary teams work on real challenges from industry, developing solutions that combine technology, business and fresh perspectives. Today, we announce which team takes home the win.

A final reflection on the day’s key ideas, conversations and takeaways, before we close Tech Blueprint and look ahead to what comes next.

Join us at the bar for drinks and snacks after the conference. Food and drinks are available for individual purchase.