The European Central Bank (ECB) is the central bank for the euro area, the group of European Union countries that use the euro as their currency. Based in Frankfurt, Germany, it was established as part of the European System of Central Banks alongside the national central banks of member states.
The ECB's main job is keeping prices stable across the euro area, so money holds its value over time. It sets interest rates and other monetary policy tools, with decisions made by its Governing Council. Beyond monetary policy, it supervises euro area banks to keep the financial system sound, oversees the payment infrastructure that lets money move smoothly between banks and across borders, issues and helps design euro banknotes, and monitors risks to overall financial stability.
Stefan Rusu
AI Product Owner
Stefan Rusu is an AI practitioner working at the intersection of agentic AI and central banking. He holds a PhD in Finance and AI (Summa Cum Laude), with research focused on machine learning models for stock market decision-making, and designs and deploys agentic AI workflows and LLM-powered chatbots used by the European Central Bank and central banks across the EU. Stefan has been involved in several of the ECB's AI projects, spanning legal and central banking applications, and launched the ECB's trainings on Prompt Engineering and AI-Assisted Coding, reaching 600+ participants at EU level, including the ECB.
He is passionate about implementing AI where it adds real business value, and about helping others use AI efficiently and responsibly at work, with a clear understanding of both its advantages and its risks.
At Agentiq World, Stefan brings hands-on experience embedding technical teams with business areas to turn loosely defined needs into production AI workflows, and shares the forward-deployed engineering approach behind it, developed in one of Europe's most demanding regulatory environments.
16:15 - 17:45
Workshop
Wed, Nov 25
Forward-Deployed Engineering for AI in Large, Regulated Organisations
Drawing on his experience building AI workflows for the ECB's Project Steering Team, Ștefan Rusu, PhD leads a hands-on workshop on forward-deployed engineering: embedding technical builders with business teams to turn loosely defined needs into production-ready AI workflows. Through a role-play exercise, participants split into business and technical teams to practice gathering requirements, then sketch a working AI workflow and choose the right tool stack for it. Attendees leave with a practical framework for aligning business and technical teams, and for diagnosing which AI tools actually fit a given use case.
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