Ascend Nashville and Brussels – just the beginning
The Nashville and Brussels events were a strong kick off to ABBYY Ascend 2026. Attendees were inspired with sessions ranging from technical deep dives to strategic discussions, equipping them to drive their own transformation journeys. The invaluable content and connections make Ascend a must-attend experience for enterprise leaders who are serious about turning AI complexity into clarity.
The ABBYY Ascend global tour continues, next stops: Tokyo, Bengaluru and Singapore. To register for an event near you, check out ABBYY Ascend 2026.
The ABBYY Ascend global event series made its highly anticipated first stops in Nashville and Brussels, delivering thought-provoking keynotes and cutting-edge product demonstrations. ABBYY Ascend opened with a clear focus: help organizations cut through the noise and understand what it really takes to turn AI initiatives into measurable impact.
ABBYY Ascend Nashville sets the stage for our global event series
As the first in-person Ascend, Nashville showcased the transformative power of ABBYY’s Document AI solutions while celebrating the vibrant community of partners, customers, and developers driving the future of intelligent automation. Through a mix of strategic perspectives and real-world examples, attendees gained a clearer picture of what it means to operationalize AI today, and what it will take to stay ahead of the curve tomorrow.
“What I learned from Ascend today is that ABBYY is leaning forward.” Morgan Conque, Ashling Partners, Most Innovative Solution of the Year Award winner
ABBYY Chief Marketing Officer Bruce Orcutt demonstrated how ABBYY’s Document AI models redefine document heavy workflows at scale. Bruce highlighted how purpose-built AI enables organizations to process business-critical documents with greater accuracy, control, and confidence. He outlined the foundation of scalable automation as trustworthy, standards-based document intelligence that can function safely across finance, operations, compliance, and customer experience. The focus on practical execution continued throughout the event and served as a powerful reminder of how ABBYY is enabling businesses to move beyond generic AI and achieve measurable results with confidence.
Scott Klososky: Operationalizing hybrid intelligence and the path to elite AI
Scott Klososky, the self-described optimist and Founder of Future Point of View, offered a pragmatic but forward-looking perspective on how enterprises can move towards Elite AI. Scott's approach acknowledges and reframes AI risk as challenges organizations can address with the right strategy, operating model, and leadership mindset. At the center of his presentation was a clear belief that the future of work will depend on a hybrid workforce, where machine intelligence and human expertise work together.
Scott demonstrated how to build this hybrid workforce, architect a blended technology stack, and led attendees to make a deliberate choice: “Do you want to be average, good, great, or elite in the outcomes you deliver?”
As an expert in how to turn technology into more than just a tool, but a competitive advantage, Scott showed what the future of enterprise AI can look like if leaders can effectively leverage synthetic and machine intelligence. Aligned with Ascends' theme, turning complexity into clarity, Scott translated the complicated concepts facing AI leaders today into an understandable, and exciting future.
ABBYY Partner Awards celebrate collaboration, innovation, and excellence
Nashville also hosted ABBYY Ascend Partner Symposium, a dedicated space for ABBYY’s partner ecosystem to connect, collaborate, and share success stories. As part of the ABBYYOne partner network, attendees got a glimpse of what’s next in the product roadmap, and the ways that ABBYY is pioneering new AI-powered solutions.
“As you know, a lot of people are trying to challenge the whole AI movement. We’re here at ABBYY, it’s being embraced, and that’s a very positive initiative moving forward”, shared Jamal Hashim, Intellera, Rising Star of the Year Award winner.
As a celebration of the critical role partners play in driving customer success, ABBYY presented the prestigious ABBYY Partner Awards. These awards recognized outstanding contributions from partners who have elevated the value of ABBYY solutions and set new benchmarks for excellence.
ABBYY Hackathon debuts in North America
ABBYY believes in always moving forward, and the hackathon at Ascend Nashville brought that mindset to life. The hackathon competition gives developers the space to experiment, compete, and demonstrate new ways to apply ABBYY’s technology to real-world challenges.
More than a competition, the hackathon serves as a proving ground for what’s possible when creativity meets capability. Winners took the stage to present their solutions, showcasing innovative ways they’ve leveraged ABBYY intelligent automation to solve complex use cases.
Representing Naviant, Mark Miller and Cam Collins presented an agentic eligibility and enrollment automation solution built with ABBYY Vantage and FlexiCapture. Naviant’s approach combined document AI with agentic AI and LLMs, moving beyond data extraction and validating business rules, detecting inconsistencies, and flagging potential fraud automatically. The result reduced manual effort while accelerating outcomes for customers.
Wisetrend’s Ilya Evdokimov demonstrated the STP Maximizer to the crowd of Nashville attendees. This solution was designed to eliminate one of the biggest bottlenecks in data workflows: human review. By integrating multiple AI models with ABBYY Vantage, the STP Maximizer was able to automatically validate captured data in the onboarding process and drive straight-through processing rates of 80-90%.
The hackathon offered a first-hand look at innovation in action. Together, the two winners demonstrated not only what ABBYY technology can do, but where it can go next.
ABBYY Ascend Brussels: The future of agentic automation
Building on the foundation established at Ascend Nashville, ABBYY Ascend Brussels brought together industry experts to discuss the shift toward safe and scalable agentic automation. Key takeaways included embedding artificial intelligence structurally, combating sophisticated document fraud, and using a hybrid approach of Document AI and generative models to extract reliable business data.
Enterprises are rapidly moving beyond generic artificial intelligence toward solutions that deliver reliable and measurable results. This shift is especially critical for the document-heavy workflows that power modern business operations. ABBYY Ascend Brussels provided a comprehensive look at how organizations can achieve this transition safely.
During the event, industry experts, partners, and business leaders gathered to explore the practical applications of artificial intelligence. The sessions covered everything from regulatory complexities in banking to the rising threat of professional document fraud. Attendees learned how high-quality document intelligence transforms workflows across finance, operations, compliance, and customer experience.
If your organization wants to move from isolated experiments to enterprise-grade automation, understanding the insights shared at this event is a crucial first step. Read on to discover the most impactful strategies and trends discussed by the experts at ABBYY Ascend Brussels.
How is ABBYY powering agentic automation with Document AI?
Chief Executive Officer Ulf Persson outlined ABBYY’s vision for intelligent automation at scale. Building on this, Vice President of AI Strategy Max Vermeir delivered a keynote focused on creating “intelligence that works.” Max explained that purpose-built Document AI models and domain-specific vision-language models enable agents to read, interpret, and act on business-critical documents with total accuracy.
Organizations need standards-based, trustworthy extraction as the foundation for scalable agentic automation. Getting your documents right is the prerequisite for any successful artificial intelligence deployment.
What are the best practices to embed AI into your organization?
Technology alone cannot drive enterprise transformation. Author and keynote speaker Dado van Peteghem presented a concrete seven-step plan to build a living artificial intelligence model in motion. He emphasized that organizations must design the right governance structures, assign clear ownership, and create accountability.
By turning these initiatives from side projects into core organizational capabilities, business leaders can spark genuine enthusiasm across their teams. Transforming your operations requires focusing on the people and the structure just as much as the software.
How will AI transform the EU banking sector?
Bartłomiej Nocoń from The Polish Bank Association highlighted how artificial intelligence is driving efficiency and cost optimization across the European Union banking sector. However, institutions face significant technological hurdles. Bartłomiej pointed to data quality, legacy system integration, cybersecurity, and explainability as major focus areas. Banks must navigate these challenges alongside regulatory compliance costs and oversight to achieve sustainable growth.
What is the hybrid approach to generative AI in production?
Generic large language models promise flexibility but often fail on accuracy and cost control. Director of Product Marketing Slavena Hristova and Director of Pre and Post Sales Katalin Fazekas demonstrated how a hybrid approach delivers fast wins.
By combining purpose-built Document AI with a generative AI portfolio, organizations achieve zero-shot extraction, auto-labelling, and domain-specific optimization. Solution Architect Alina Sysko and Director of Product Management Brook Meier further explained how this architecture minimizes hallucinations and controls token usage in real-world workflows.
How can organizations stop sophisticated document fraud?
As document automation scales, the risk of scaling fraud grows alongside it. Head of Product Marketing and Threat Intelligence at Resistant AI Joe Lemonnier shared insights from an analysis of over 170 million documents across 135 countries.
He revealed a critical blind spot in most corporate fraud strategies. While basic edits get caught, sophisticated fraud uses coordinated networks, metadata scrubbing, format hopping, and generative models to slip through traditional controls. Organizations must implement document integrity checks as an essential layer in their intelligent document processing stacks to address these costly attacks.
What are the next steps for your automation journey?
The event concluded with an award ceremony hosted by Chief Revenue Officer Neil Murphy, celebrating the customers and partners who bring the future of intelligent automation to life. Deploying advanced platforms requires careful planning, but the competitive advantages are immense. ABBYY provides the purpose-built solutions you need to transform enterprise processes and data safely.
Platinum Sponsor
Resistant AI
Cutting-edge AI to outsmart criminals. Delivering proven and trustworthy results that protect organizations from fraud and financial crime.
We build AI to catch criminal AI — because that’s who we’ve always been. Rooted in cybersecurity, we’ve spent our careers studying adversaries, reverse-engineering threats, and designing systems that adapt faster than the fraud. Now we apply that same discipline to the hardest problem in financial crime: prevention at scale.
Premium Sponsor
eSourcing
eSourcing has been providing tailor-made mass efficiency solutions to the European banking sector for almost 30 years. We specialize in the development and outsourcing of proprietary IT solutions supporting the banking sector and the POS payment terminal market. In Central and Eastern Europe, 13 banks use eSourcing solutions for their daily business.
Sponsors
Avalara
Agentic Tax and Compliance™, trusted and built to scale. Let agentic AI do the tax work. Avalara automates your compliance tasks for speed, accuracy, and scale.
Camunda
Camunda enables organizations to orchestrate processes across people, systems, and devices to continuously overcome complexity and increase efficiency.
Parascript
AI-powered SDKs for accurate check recognition, handwriting capture, and fraud detection—integrating seamlessly for faster processing and stronger protection without disrupting operations.
Reveille Software
Reveille ensures automation is always working by delivering Service Level Assurance for the document-centric processes that power modern enterprises.
SVA
SVA is one of Germany's leading IT service providers and employs more than 3.800 people at 28 locations. SVA's entrepreneurial goal is to combine high-quality IT products from leading manufacturers with SVA's project know-how, service spectrum and flexibility in order to develop optimal solutions for customers.
Wisetrend
WiseTREND empowers businesses with AI-driven Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) solutions that extract valuable information from unstructured data and automate document-heavy workflows.
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