In Amsterdam, more than 200 IT experts, innovators, and industry leaders came together for Arch9 2025 to explore the next wave of software engineering and AI-driven transformation. This year’s edition highlighted how organizations are moving from experimentation to real, scalable impact, using AI to accelerate product development, strengthen resilience, and build a more sustainable digital economy.
The event was co-hosted by Levi9’s Mirjana Kolarov, Delivery Director and Dario Djurica, Principal Architect. Throughout the day, they guided attendees through advanced perspectives on integrating AI into engineering workflows, creating intelligent architectures, and aligning technology choices with long-term business strategy.
Across keynotes, panels, and deep-dive sessions, participants explored hands-on insights powered by real customer cases. The discussions revealed how companies are now using AI not only to improve efficiency and agility, but also to make measurable progress on sustainability, innovation velocity, and responsible technology adoption.
Dario Djurica and Jan Dolinaj on Navigating the New Era of AI-Driven Software Development
Jan and Dario opened Arch9 with a very engaging sessions, exploring how AI is reshaping the software development lifecycle. They shared practical examples from Levi9’s own teams, showing how AI now supports everything from requirements and architecture to testing and operations. Their message was clear: AI isn’t just a tool. It’s a catalyst that amplifies human creativity, speeds up delivery, and demands new skills.
Jan and Dario also introduced Quality9, Levi9’s internal framework for ensuring that AI-driven software maintains the same standards of security, reliability, and compliance as traditional development. They discussed measurable productivity gains, adoption strategies, and the importance of human oversight in an increasingly agentic development world.
Their session concluded with a call to action to experiment boldly, measure outcomes, and use AI not just to code faster, but to build smarter and more sustainably.
As a surprise twist, the whole crowd got exclusive access to an on-demand AI-SDLC workshop.
“Technology has always changed the world, but now it’s changing how we build the world itself.”
Tim Stierman, IKEA, Democratizing data and insights for IKEA co-workers worldwide
Tim from IKEA shared how they are democratising data and insights for the many. Not just for analysts, but for tens of thousands of co-workers worldwide. With a global CX platform (PulseCX), a data mesh architecture, and over 2.5 million monthly feedback inputs across dozens of touchpoints, IKEA is building a unified, always-on view of customer experience. This enables better decision-making across the entire customer journey, from visiting and choosing to receiving, using, and supporting IKEA products. Their mission is clear: bring the customer’s voice to the heart of every decision and empower co-workers everywhere with meaningful, actionable insights.
The session also highlighted how IKEA is embracing AI to break down barriers to insight adoption. Their new AI chatbot allows co-workers to “chat with their data”, retrieving insights, producing summaries, and guiding users toward the right decisions. While the first pilot revealed challenges around trust, quality, and hallucination, IKEA doubled down rather than stepping back. The second wave of pilots is now underway, with key learnings around human-AI collaboration, rapid tech evolution, and the need to build, measure, and learn continuously.
The result offers a glimpse into IKEA’s future: a world where data and AI help create better everyday experiences, both for customers and for co-workers.
“Successfully scaling data and insights for 220.000 co-workers worldwide is more an adoption process than a tech process”
Mart Noten, NS & Filip Stanicic, Levi9 on NS' cloud migration
Mart and Filip presented the multi-year cloud migration journey that transformed NS’s digital ecosystem. With millions of daily users and mission-critical services powering the Dutch rail network, NS needed a modern, scalable, secure cloud foundation. The session highlighted the early challenges, followed by a decisive turning point driven by pragmatic decision-making, hybrid collaboration, and a strong partnership with the Centrale Platform Organisatie. By focusing on empowerment, observability, reusable components, and team autonomy, NS shifted from planning to accelerating.
The transformation has already delivered meaningful impact: reduced operational costs, significantly faster APIs, simplified codebases, and dramatically improved time-to-market—often moving from laptop to production in a matter of hours. Communities such as Cloud Guilds and Backend Guilds emerged to support knowledge sharing and strengthen ownership. The result is a cloud-native culture where engineers feel empowered, teams take responsibility end-to-end, and NS is better equipped than ever to support a sustainably accessible Netherlands. While the journey continues, the foundation, and the momentum, is now firmly established.
“Transformations are a never-ending process, but ownership is crucial for both the business and the engineers in order to make them valuable.”
Kosta Stojakovic on Architecting AI succes with data and cloud
In his Tech Studio session, “Architecting AI Success with Data & Cloud,” Levi9 Principal Architect Kosta Stojaković explored what it really takes to move from promising AI ideas to reliable business outcomes. Starting from his own journey as an American football head coach obsessed with performance data, he drew a clear parallel: just like in sports, AI initiatives stand or fall on the quality of their data and the strength of their architecture. He walked through modern data patterns, from data lakes and lakehouses to data platforms, data mesh and data fabric, and explained where they help, where they hurt, and why “garbage in, garbage out” still rules, no matter how powerful the model is.
Kosta also broke down the role of the major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and their AI services (Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, Vertex AI), highlighting how cloud, data and architecture together shape AI success. Using anonymised real-world cases, he showed how missing consent, noisy features or weak data strategy can derail even the most ambitious use cases, and how careful design, MLOps and human-in-the-loop validation can turn things around. He closed with a set of concrete lessons: start from business value, define success criteria together, validate data early, and don’t get stuck in “bronze-only” data. The message was clear: AI success is not magic: it’s architecture, discipline and good data.
“It’s not just about integrating key AI components like data, infrastructure, and architecture; it’s about utilizing them to build a foundation and maximize your potential by looking ahead.”
Andrew Day and Andrew Evans from ai.io together with Igor Dedic (Levi9) on Transforming Human Performance through Technology
AI.io presented an inspiring session, demonstrating how artificial intelligence and computer vision are revolutionising global talent discovery. By using nothing more than a mobile phone, ai.io enables players anywhere, from rural India to urban Europe, to perform drills, receive objective biomechanical scoring, and be surfaced to professional clubs based on data, not chance. Igor showcased how Levi9 helped rebuild the entire platform architecture to support hundreds of millions of potential users, multi-tenant deployments, and AI-powered scaling across cloud environments.
The session highlighted not only the technical achievement but the human impact. More than 600 players have already been trialled or signed by professional clubs through the platform, including children who had never played organised football. With expansion into new sports, multilingual support, and cloud-portable infrastructure, AI.io is now positioned as a global technology capable of transforming opportunity at scale. This session stood out as a powerful example of AI delivering real-world change.
“Talent is created equally. Opportunity isn’t. Our job is to close that gap through technology. We’re proving that a simple mobile phone and the right data can change a person’s life forever.”
Pim van Boekhold, DPG Media on how DPG Media built an AI-powered ad platform to compete with Big Tech
Pim shared DPG’s story: how a centuries-old publisher reinvented itself into a digital advertising innovator capable of competing with global tech giants. With 80% of digital ad spend flowing to platforms like Google and Meta, DPG recognized the urgent need to regain control of its own supply chain. The company invested heavily in identity, data, and AI-driven technology, partnering with Levi9 to build its own ad-tech ecosystem: a data platform, a design studio, and a full end-to-end Ad Manager that now processes a quarter of all DPG advertising revenue.
The session also highlighted the company’s responsible approach to AI. DPG uses AI to optimize ads and support creative production but draws a clear line at editorial content, which remains fully human-made to protect journalistic integrity. With new AI-driven features, retail data integrations, and CTV buying capabilities, DPG demonstrated how European publishers can compete by staying focused, moving fast, and leveraging their unique strengths: quality content, trust, and deep local reach.
“DPG Media is building Ad Manager to show that local media can innovate just as fast as Big Tech, but with more trust, transparency and control.”
Bart Vos from ASICS and Mirjana Kolarov on how to get from "Vision to Value" through product-led thinking
In their session “From Vision to Value: The ASICS Mobile App,” ASICS Digital and Levi9 shared how they partnered to build a globally scalable mobile app in under a year, grounded in ASICS’ founding philosophy of a sound mind in a sound body. Bart and Mirjana walked through the brand’s digital transformation, from an output-driven model to a product-led operating model focused on outcomes, customer-centric design, and global–local balance. They explained how consumer research shaped the vision for the app and how personalization and contextual communication became the foundation for product success.
The session also highlighted the critical technical decisions behind the app’s rapid delivery, including choosing Flutter for flexibility and efficiency, and implementing a headless, composable architecture to support global rollout. With launches in Japan, Arabia, and North America (and Europe and Australia next) the app has become one of ASICS’ strongest loyalty acquisition channels, consistently outperforming mobile web with double conversion rates. The talk emphasized strategy, technology, and true partnership as the core drivers of this success.
“Start small, release early, and improve incrementally based on customer feedback, data, and strategic alignment. Success depends on a partnership built on knowledge, cultural fit, celebrate success, and a shared commitment to outcomes – not just deliverables.”
Ana-Maria Cehan and Daniel Capitanu, Levi9 on Strategic Data Transformation: From BI Reports to AI-Powered Decision Making
Levi9’s data and AI session, led by Daniel and Anna, explored how organizations can move from traditional BI toward AI-powered decision-making. The speakers highlighted the growing complexity of business decisions and the rising expectations from leaders who need faster, more contextual insights. They explained why Big Data alone never fulfilled its early promises, and how today’s AI technologies finally enable predictive, scalable, and personalized decision support. With Gartner and McKinsey numbers emphasizing the stakes, the session showed how AI augments rather than replaces human intelligence.
Ana-Maria and Daniel also tackled the foundations required for success: high-quality integrated data, a clear data strategy, strong teams, and a culture ready to embrace change. They walked the audience through real-world use cases, from automated supply chain processes to intelligent analytics pipelines, and addressed challenges such as data bias, model explainability, scalability, and compliance.
Their core message was that technology alone is not enough; organizations must combine the right tools with leadership, governance, and a data-driven mindset to unlock real value.
“Traditional BI helps you understand what happened. AI helps you decide what happens next.”
Arjan Hijstek from Snowflake on turning data conversations into insights
Snowflake’s session, led by Arjan Hijstek, offered a dynamic and technically insightful moments of the event. He walked attendees through the evolution of the Snowflake platform and demonstrated how its cloud-agnostic architecture, global data sharing capabilities, and integrated compute layers enable organisations to work with data in radically simple yet highly scalable ways. The talk highlighted Snowgrid, Snowflake’s powerful ecosystem for live and secure data sharing, and the growing ecosystem of tools such as Python, Streamlit, and DBT that run natively inside the platform.
The second half of the session focused on Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex AI, showcasing how LLMs, vector search, and document intelligence now operate directly inside customers’ Snowflake accounts. Through a live demo, Arjan demonstrated natural-language querying of structured data, PDF analysis, and advanced unstructured search. All without moving data outside Snowflake.
His closing message summed it up: Snowflake has evolved from a data warehouse into a full AI-native data platform.
“What if you could talk to your data and get results, no matter the kind of data and your language. Secure, governed, easy?”
Chris Heemskerk from The Innovation Alliance on Building a World-Class Innovation Culture
Innovation can’t be an add-on, it must be a disciplined, cultural capability. In his keynote Building a World-Class Innovation Culture, former Google executive Chris Heemskerk explains how organisations move from experimenting with ideas to building a true “innovation engine.” He introduces The Innovation Scorecard™ as a framework to measure and scale innovation, but emphasises that the foundation is culture: psychological safety, cognitive diversity, and collaboration. When teams feel safe to challenge assumptions and are encouraged to think differently, they generate the bold ideas that drive long-term progress.
Chris connects this mindset to the S-curve innovation cycle, the pattern behind how companies like Amazon, Netflix and Tesla consistently reinvent themselves. Breakthroughs start slowly, accelerate sharply, and eventually plateau. So the best organisations actively prepare their next S-curve before the current one peaks. Sustained innovation therefore requires structure, metrics and repeatable processes, not one-off initiatives. By contrasting companies that continuously evolve with those that stall,
Heemskerk shows that innovation becomes durable only when culture, frameworks and operational discipline work together. The message for leaders is simple: build the conditions, provide the tools, and innovation will become a continuous strategic advantage rather than a reactive effort.
“Innovation is entrepreneurship. There are no silver bullets – only a 360° commitment will do. It’s not a 9-5 job; it demands vision, perseverance, urgency, and bold, customer-driven execution.”
Arch9 will return in 2026! If can’t wait like us and want to get ahead on your cloud or data platform strategy?
Join our webinar “Which Option to Pick When Data-Centric Kick In” where we will share how to:
Match platforms to your business needs
Understand the true costs of each option
Stay on top of the latest developments
Avoid common pitfalls that derail decisions
See you there!
