EO Day 2026: Owning the Vibe

With “Owning the Vibe,” Experience One set the agenda at EO Day 2026 that is shaping this year’s AI debate. Over 100 decision-makers, practitioners, and thought leaders gathered in Stuttgart to discuss what it takes to turn the “vibe” into real business value.

Vibe coding and AI agents are transforming how we think about, develop, and use software. Companies are suddenly confronted with a flood of AI artifacts—without clear lines of responsibility or evaluation criteria. This makes people who step up to take responsibility and know how to further develop AI in a value-adding way a crucial factor for success.

At EO Day, we therefore discussed the question: Who keeps track of everything when everyone is “vibing”?

The afternoon kicked off with four practice sessions: Companies from various industries provided candid insights into their ongoing AI projects—sharing concrete lessons learned, as well as what isn’t working yet.

• Engineering Agentic Chatbots – Why Intent-Based Architectures Fail and How Agentic AI Scales in the Enterprise (BARMER)
• Digital UX – From Vision to Transformation (Bosch eBike Systems)
• Scaling Sovereign AI in Banking: From AI Assistance to Agentic Systems (Finanz Informatik)
• Between Strategy and PoC: A Case Study on the Development of an Agentic CX Framework (Siemens)

The Hype Around the “Vibe”—and What Lies Behind It

Kai Müller, CEO of Experience One, covered the full spectrum of topics in his keynote: What began as a collective sense of optimism—the “vibe”—has now become a tangible area of tension in the business world.

He mapped this development against the 5-level model for AI experiences: Most companies today stand at the threshold between Levels 2 and 3—moving from reactive automation to intent-based, autonomously acting AI agents. Those who skip this step are building on sand.

Three strategies that point the way:

1. Narrow the playing field. Don’t take a scattergun approach to AI; instead, adopt a radical focus. New ideas don’t emerge in spite of limited constraints, but because of them. Those who start with a specific use case build a capability from it—one that can then be scaled company-wide.
2. Establish ground rules. Everyone wants to “vibe,” but without structure, things get out of hand. Innovation isn’t a creative fluke; it’s a structured process. The path from PoC to a scaled agent system requires clear processes.
3. Take ownership. In Vibe Coding, expectations shift quickly: prototypes look like finished products, even though they aren’t. What companies need are people who take responsibility—with a clear goal, sound judgment, strong leadership, a willingness to collaborate, and a high tolerance for ambiguity.

Ownership in the Panel: Who Takes Responsibility When Everyone Is “Vibing”?

In the panel discussion, Kai Müller moderated a roundtable featuring three very different perspectives: Human Nagafi (1789 Innovations), Dionysios Satikidis (Mercedes-Benz), and Prof. Dr. Lutz Göcke (Nordhausen University of Applied Sciences).

A common thread ran through the entire discussion: Experimenting early on protects against mistakes later on—but only if lessons are learned from them. Dionysios Satikidis summed it up: Those who start exploring early on understand in time what brings real added value—and can scale up later instead of having to make course corrections.

The insights from the panel continued to resonate long into the networking session that followed.

For more insights into the day, visit our event page at eoday.experienceone.com

Interested in joining us for the next EO Day?

The next EO Day will take place on June 3, 2027, in Stuttgart. Register now and join us: