Cologne AI and Machine Learning Meetup

CAIML #40 is going to happen on January 20, 2026, at Nandu and will be sponsored by PAYBACK.

Agenda

18h30 Open Doors
19h00 Welcome & Intro
19h15 Billy Kunze (AI Agent Engineer at Nandu) & Roberto Russo (Co-Founder at Nandu): Teaching LLMs to Work with Data: From Zero to Production with LangGraph & LangSmith

LLMs are great at language — but terrible with data. Over the past year, we built a production system that bridges that gap: combining LangGraph and LangSmith with real analytics pipelines to turn raw data into contextual insights. This talk shares our hands-on learnings from starting at zero to running a full production setup in just twelve months: how we structured multi-agent workflows, managed retrieval and context, and connected the system to SQL-based sources and evaluation traces. Expect a mix of architecture lessons, pitfalls, and examples of how to make LLMs reason with data, not just talk about it.

- 5 Minute Break -

19h50 Alexander Khachikyan (Principal AI & Data Scientist at PAYBACK) & Falko Trischler (Director Data Science & Machine Learning Engineering at PAYBACK): Intelligent Agents in Loyalty Programs: PAYBACK’S Experiences with Agentic AI

Autonomous Agents that perform tasks proactively and adapt to complex environments hold immense potential for automation and personalization. But how to bridge the gap from theory to productive reality within a complex enterprise environment? This talk offers an honest dive into PAYBACK‘s enterprise path with Agentic AI. We'll detail what worked well, where we encountered hurdles, and the lessons learned in bringing AI agents into production across multiple domains. Through concrete use cases we’ll share first-hand insights. We’ll also demonstrate how PAYBACK leverages LLMOps and multimodal models to drive efficiency, creativity, and scalability within our loyalty programs.

20h20 Networking with food and drinks provided by PAYBACK

See you in January,
Aaqib, Marc & Fabian