The AI Nobody Is Selling You
There Is More Than One Way to Say AI
Wednesday 9 December 2026, 10:00 to 13:30
Kasteel Sint-Michiels, Sint-Katelijne-Waver
Organized by 45 Degrees and Exsertus. In English. Free of charge.
There is more than one way to say AI. This session looks at the option almost nobody has a commercial reason to sell you: owning the AI platform instead of renting it.
Every organization running AI receives a monthly bill that is hard to predict and hard to justify. Consumption-based AI moves without warning. Seat-based AI is predictable, but many licenses are barely used. Most enterprises have both problems at the same time.
The alternative: instead of renting access to a model, own the AI platform itself, model included, on infrastructure you control. Open weight models have closed much of the capability gap. For a meaningful share of enterprise workloads, they are now a credible option.
This choice is not only about cost. It touches data sovereignty, European regulation, vendor independence, and the freedom to build division-specific assistants without redoing the integration work every time.
But an owned AI platform only works on a solid foundation. A self-hosted model is less forgiving of a weak foundation than a rented API. This is where the conversation stops being about AI and starts being about platform engineering. In this session we cover both: the architectural frame, and what it looks like once you start building.
Architects and Engineers
Sharing Real Experience
The Architectural Frame
A structured model for platform engineering, and where AI genuinely fits inside it. Not a slide with the word AI on it, but a defined capability area with its own components, interfaces and governance.
The Practical Reality
What you will run into once you decide to go this road, shown through a working example that we built ourselves.
Facilitated Q&A
Your questions to the speakers, on trade-offs, roles, and what works.
We Are Not an AI Company
We Are Architects
Agenda
Welcome Coffee
Welcome and Introduction
From Platform Engineering to an Owned AI Platform
Diederik Wyffels, Managing Partner, 45 Degrees
We start with the foundation: our platform engineering framework of 12 capability planes and 76 components, and why it is an architectural model, not a tooling choice. Then we add AI, which plays two roles. As a horizontal accelerator, it changes the speed and cost of every other plane. As a capability of its own, the AI Plane, it is something the enterprise builds and serves to the business: model serving and inference, fine-tuning, retrieval and grounding, prompt and model registry, agent orchestration, evaluation and red-teaming, AI observability and AI governance. We close with the decision now reaching architects and CIOs: rent AI or own it. What an owned platform requires, what it solves, and where its limits are.
What You Will Actually Run Into
Bart Schuddinck and Tom Borloo, Managing Partners, Exsertus
Customers asked us to build this kind of scenario for them, and that surfaced practical and technical challenges that are easy to underestimate from a slide. Our example: an assistant that looks and behaves like a closed vendor AI product, but runs open weight models behind the scenes, or whichever model you decide to put behind it. The assistant is the vehicle, not the point. We walk through the decisions, trade-offs and surprises: serving and performance, integration, governance and keeping it running. Expect real engineering detail, honest dead ends, and the decisions that turned out to matter most.
Break
Facilitated Q&A Session
Facilitated by Bert Teuwen, Managing Partner, 45 Degrees
Your questions to the speakers, facilitated so the discussion stays concrete and everyone gets the floor. Topics we expect:
- Which workloads belong on an owned platform, and which do not
- What changes for architects and engineers when AI becomes a platform capability instead of a vendor contract
- Where the real cost, risk and effort sit, compared to where people expect them
- Who owns AI architecture in your organization today, and whether that role exists yet
Lunch and Informal Exchange
Kasteel Sint-Michiels
Sint-Katelijne-Waver
Built for the People Who
Design, Build and Defend This
- Enterprise Architects, Lead and Principal Architects
- Solution Architects working at enterprise scale
- Cloud and Infrastructure Architects
- Security and Data Architects involved in AI workloads
- AI Platform Architects, or anyone already doing that job without the title
- AI Platform Engineers and senior developers who build and operate these services
Are you the person your organization turns to when the question becomes “should we host this ourselves”? Then this session is designed for you.
Not directly relevant for you? Feel free to forward this page to a colleague.
Practical Information
Wednesday 9 December 2026
10:00 to 13:30
Lunch included
Kasteel Sint-Michiels
Groenstraat 11
2860 Sint-Katelijne-Waver
English
In-person, with a live demonstration and open discussion
Free of charge
Two Sister Companies
in the Cronos Group
45 Degrees
We are architects. We help IT organizations deliver business value and innovation, in a cost efficient way, through strong capabilities, a solid platform and data as a catalyst. We support customers from strategy to implementation.
Exsertus
Exsertus builds custom software on web, cloud and AI technology, working closely with Microsoft on .NET and Azure: web and cloud-native delivery, application modernization, cloud adoption, SDLC automation and product development. A no-nonsense, pragmatic approach.
In-person, in English, free of charge. Lunch included.
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