From 20 to 22 July 2026, the European Agentic AI Bootcamp brought together participants from across Europe for an online training. The English-language intermediate-level training was designed for developers, researchers, businesses, public sector organisations, start-ups and SMEs who wanted not only to understand AI agents, but also to build, evaluate and integrate them into real-world workflows.
The bootcamp was jointly organised by several European organizations—AI Factory Austria, HammerHAI, Gaia AI Factory, and PHAROS-CY—as well as leading partners from the high-performance computing and AI ecosystem: Austrian Scientific Computing (ASC), the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), the Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet AGH, OpenACC, and NVIDIA. As such, it exemplified the European vision behind the AI Factories: connecting national strengths, sharing expertise, and providing businesses, researchers and public sector organisations with accessible pathways to advanced AI capabilities.
Agentic AI refers to AI systems capable of planning and carrying out complex tasks more autonomously by combining multiple data sources, tools and intermediate steps. For organisations, this opens up new opportunities ranging from intelligent assistants and automated analysis workflows to sophisticated applications in research, industry and public administration. At the same time, it raises new challenges in system architecture, quality assurance, latency, performance, security and responsible deployment.
“Agentic AI marks the transition from individual AI tools to systems that can plan tasks, make use of context and independently support workflows. This presents enormous opportunities for organisations—but only if teams understand how these systems are built, evaluated and deployed responsibly. The European Agentic AI Bootcamp creates exactly this kind of practical learning environment.”
Claudia Blaas-Schenner, Head of AI:AT Learning Center
Practical tools for modern AI agents
The bootcamp focused on practical building blocks for modern AI agents, including Agent Skills, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), NVIDIA® NIM™, LangGraph and the NVIDIA NeMo™ Agent Toolkit. Participants learned how to develop Agent Skills, build HTTP-based MCP clients and servers, and integrate these technologies into LLM workflows orchestrated with LangGraph and the NVIDIA NeMo Agent Toolkit.
Around 250 participants from across Europe worked alongside 30 trainers, tutors and technical assistants, demonstrating the international collaboration that characterises the European AI Factory network. The practical exercises were supported by Athena, Cyfronet’s supercomputer in Poland.
“Participants arrived eager to learn and left with a far deeper understanding than we had originally planned for. This clearly demonstrates the strong demand for practical bootcamps on Agentic AI.”
Krishna Kalyan, Developer Advocate Engineer NVIDIA
Abschließend wendeten die Teilnehmenden das Gelernte in einer Hands-on-Challenge auf einen bestehenden LLM-Workflow an. Ziel war es, wiederverwendbare Muster zu vermitteln, die Teams für eigene Anwendungen adaptieren können – inklusive früher Bewertung von Qualität, Latenz und Performance.
“The AI Factories are not intended as isolated national initiatives, but as a Europeannetwork. This bootcamp demonstrates in a very tangible way how collaboration across that network creates impact: we combine expertise, access to infrastructure and practical implementation to help bring AI applications into real-world use more quickly, effectively and responsibly.”
Karl Kugler, Co-Lead AI Factory Austria AI:AT
European collaboration as a competitive advantage
A key focus of the bootcamp was collaboration across multiple AI Factories. By jointly delivering the programme, the partners not only pooled technical expertise but also created a shared European environment for learning and practical collaboration. Participants gained access to knowledge from different national AI ecosystems and prepared for applications that can be further developed through future European hackathons and AI projects.
„Agentic AI requires close integration of software architecture, computing infrastructure, tool integration and operational expertise. This is precisely where the AI Factories can create added value together: by improving access to knowledge, tools and European resources, and helping organisations make the right architectural decisions from the outset.”
Markus Stöhr, Co-Lead of AI Factory Austria
Organisers
The European Agentic AI Bootcamp was jointly organised by AI:AT, HammerHAI, Gaia AI Factory, PHAROS-CY, ASC, HLRS, LRZ, Cyfronet, OpenACC and NVIDIA.
About the AI Factory Austria AI:AT
AI Factory Austria AI:AT is Austria’s national AI Factory within the framework of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. It is jointly managed by the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology and Advanced Computing Austria (ACA) and implemented by a consortium spanning the whole of Austria.
The partners in the consortium are: Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), University of Vienna, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU), University of Innsbruck, Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU), the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), INiTS – Vienna’s High-Tech Incubator, and EODC – Earth Observation Data Centre for Water Resources Monitoring GmbH.
AI:AT combines AI-optimised high-performance infrastructure with a physical hub and supports organizations from business, public administration and applied research as a market-neutral, independent access point along the AI journey – from the first use case to practical implementation.
Funding Acknowledgement
The AI Factory Austria (AI:AT) is co-funded by the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement no. 101253078. The Joint Undertaking is supported by the Horizon Europe program of the European Union and Austria (BMIMI/FFG).
Contact:
Daniel Pepl, MAS MBA
Head of Marketing & Communications
AI Factory Austria AI:AT
Mobile: +43 664 6207805 I daniel.pepl@ai-at.eu I www.ai-at.eu
