AI Journey 2025: Design the future of AI today!

Scientists, visionaries, and global AI practitioners come together on one stage. Here you can hear the voices of those who don't just believe in the future—they are creating it!

Among the speakers are the visionaries Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan, whose predictions about AI have become reality, along with dozens of other world-class AI gurus! We'll show how engineers and scientists make scientific and technological breakthroughs that shape our future today! The program includes presentations by researchers from different countries around the globe.

Ride the wave with the AI of the future! Join AI Journey 2025!

Senior Vice President of Sber Andrey Belevtsev with the first Sber's anthropomorphic robot Green

 

AI Journey 2025 Conference in Moscow

In a packed Moscow conference hall, an anthropomorphic robot named Green takes the stage with a professional choreographer. The pair move in precise unison: a sequence of spins, dips and synchronized steps that would not look out of place on a television talent show. The crowd reaches for their phones. Clips appear online within minutes.

It is a carefully staged scene. It is also the kind of scene many Western observers assumed they would not be seeing from Russia in 2025.

AI Journey, now in its 10th year, has grown into one of the largest annual AI gatherings outside the traditional Western circuit. Delegations came to Moscow this year not only from BRICS but from other countries: researchers, regulators, and corporate technologists.

On the opening day, Russian President Vladimir Putin said, generative AI technology is becoming core and strategic technology. Major companies and leading countries are vying to develop proprietary fundamental language models, according to the official website of the President of Russia. 

The conference is hosted by Sber, the country's dominant financial institution turned technology conglomerate. The bank used the event to showcase a suite of releases that are quite unexpected given the notion of a nation cut off from modern tools. Among them were new models in its flagship GigaChat line, Ultra-Preview and Lightning, built for Russian-language tasks, and an updated generation of its GigaAM-v3 speech-recognition system and the Kandinsky 5.0 image models and compression models K-VAE 1.0, essential for training visual content generation models. Sber has opened weights to all of these AI models to businesses and developers.

Sber has committed to publishing its models in open source, including the weights required to reproduce and adapt them. In the AI world, that is the difference between a glossy demo and a genuine building block.

Nowhere is the blend of ambition and experimentation more visible than in Sber's concept of empathetic banking. On the exhibition floor, visitors queued to try the bank's new ATM prototype equipped with GigaChat as a voice assistant and with sensors designed to "read" a customer's state in real time. The device is intended not merely to dispense cash, but to adjust its tone, pace and suggestions to the person standing in front of it.

It is an early implementation of an idea that makes many Western institutions nervous: a financial interface that observes, infers, and responds, using AI as a companion rather than a hidden engine behind the screen. In most developed economies, cash machines remain resolutely transactional. They do not attempt to understand you; they barely acknowledge you. In Moscow, a major bank is experimenting with the opposite.

None of this means Russia has solved all the ethical, legal, or security questions that surround AI. But the broader impression from AI Journey is one of a country that has refused the role assigned to it in many Western narratives: that of a technological laggard, permanently dependent on imported ideas.

With less ability to import, there is more pressure to invent. With fewer convenient foreign platforms to lean on, there is a stronger imperative to build domestic ones. Sber's increasingly visible role as a provider of models and end-user products is as much a response to those pressures as it is a strategic choice.

Russia is a country that, despite repeated blows to its technological foundations, has learnt to keep walking - and occasionally, as the dancing robot on stage suggests, to perform tricks of its own. Notably, the robot boasts voice-interaction capabilities enabled by integrating GigaChat's conversational system.

It is a reminder that in the competition to shape the tools that will define the next decades, new players can emerge precisely the places where they were least expected.