Work / Prompting Europe
Prompting Europe
- Client
- Prompting Europe
- Year
- 2024
- Role
- Co-founder — proposition and the interactive part of the events
- Question
- Europe's AI ecosystem is fragmented: every hub builds on its own, so there is no scale to compete globally.
- Approach
- Connected the hubs and treated AI as one European market, with editions at the start-up hubs themselves as the engine.
- Result
- Six editions at start-up hubs in Rome, Barcelona, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Paris.
The situation
Europe has no shortage of AI start-ups. It has a shortage of cohesion. Every city builds its own hub, every country its own programmes, and what works in Stockholm, Barcelona doesn’t know about.
That’s not just a pity, it’s a strategic problem. On a topic moving as fast as AI, fragmentation costs you exactly what you need most: speed and scale. On paper Europe is one market; in practice it doesn’t behave like one.
We founded Prompting Europe to accelerate the ecosystem around AI start-ups, by connecting those hubs and treating AI as one European market. That’s the precondition for still taking part in the global race.
What I did
As co-founder I shaped the proposition, and partly the shape of the events themselves.
I developed the interactive part. An edition where you only listen to speakers accelerates nothing — you go home with notes. The game elements are there to make participants work together during the day instead of sitting next to each other. Interaction is what connects an ecosystem, not a programme booklet.
It’s the same conviction that underlies my coaching work: people change their behaviour by doing something, not by watching it.
What came of it
Six editions, each at the city’s own start-up hub: Rome, Barcelona, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Paris. Not one conference everyone travels to, but six times plugging into an ecosystem that was already there.
What doesn’t work: a static event with speakers. It fills a room and changes nothing. It has to be human interaction, where founders put their problems openly on the table. Only then do you see how often two cities have the same problem — and that is exactly the moment an ecosystem connects.