October 13, 2025/by Young AI Leaders Austria
War for AI Talent at JKU LIT Open Innovation Center
Keynotes, panels, a talent area with 200+ students, and a leadership dinner on Europe’s race for AI talent.
On 13 October 2025, Young AI Leaders Austria hosted “War for AI Talent – How AI is fundamentally changing the way we work” at JKU – LIT Open Innovation Center.
What happened
The programme featured keynotes and panels with leaders including Maimuna Mosser (Google Austria), Hermann Erlach (Microsoft Austria), Sebastian Eckler (AWS Austria), Sepp Hochreiter (Bilateral AI / NXAI), Gordon Meyer (Dynatrace), Anna Maria Brunnhofer-Pedemonte (Impact AI), Andreas Hladky (PwC Austria), Patrick Wollner (McKinsey Austria), Fredrik Debong (Nineteen Twenty-One), and Lukas Schuster (Syntactiq).
An AI Talent Area enabled direct exchange with more than 200 students and alumni, followed by an invitation-only Leadership Dinner with speakers and leaders from business, research, and policy.
Why it matters
Austria saw more than 170,000 highly qualified professionals leave between 2011 and 2023, while demand for AI roles has surged fivefold since 2015. The event put talent retention, skills, and competitiveness on a shared stage—and showed why Europe must redefine roles as carefully as it fills them.