Profitability AI: Build it right. Make it fast. Keep it cheap.

We're super excited for our last meetup of 2025 - just before the holidays start, we're back in Amsterdam, and this time at AI House Amsterdam powered by Prosus, on Wednesday 10 December!

This edition will be extra interesting, since it will be about Profitability AI: Build it right. Make it fast. Keep it cheap.

AI projects don’t become business-critical overnight. They move through stages: from spark-of-an-idea prototypes to hardened, scalable systems that drive real revenue. In this meetup edition, we invite industry leaders to share the technical journeys their AI projects went through before becoming part of their core business. This evening is all about what it actually takes to build profitable AI: not just using the latest models, but creating systems that are efficient, scalable, operationally reliable, and deliver measurable value. You’ll hear how teams navigate the messy middle, from architecture choices to optimization strategies, to transform AI from a cool demo into a cost-effective production engine. Expect an honest look at real-world trade-offs, engineering challenges, and the solutions that made their AI both powerful and economical.

Excited as well?! We'd love to welcome you for a evening full of knowledge sharing, demos and of course great conversations, networking, and above all a fun evening with the PyData community!

Agenda

• 18:00 - 19:00: Walk-in with drinks & food
• 19:00 - 19:45: Talk 1 - Scaling Personalized Push Notifications by Floris Fok
• 19:45 - 20:00: Short break
• 20:00 - 20:45: Talk 2 - LLM distillation explained: Make smarter, cheaper, and deployable AI for enterprises by Mashrur Haider
• 20:45 - 21:30: Networking + drinks & bites

Talk 1 : Scaling Personalized Push Notifications by Floris Fok

This talk explores how we productionize personalized push notifications at scale—moving from proof-of-concept to serving 130 billion tokens per day to nearly half of Brazil's population.
We'll share the journey from traditional CRM systems to personalized-powered notifications, covering the data processing pipeline, key architectural decisions, and operational challenges. Learn the trade-offs we navigated between latency and personalization depth, how we achieved a cost per order under 10 cents, and practical insights into productionizing foundation models for commerce.

Floris Fok is a Senior AI Engineer at Prosus Group, specializing in Generative AI. He helped develop Europe's second foundational model, Climate GPT, and has over 4 years of NLP experience spanning technologies from BERT to DeepSeek. Floris played a role in the development of Toqan and has been utilizing it since its early days.

Talk 2 : LLM distillation explained: Make smarter, cheaper, and deployable AI for enterprises by Mashrur Haider

Running large LLMs in production is expensive, but often unnecessary. In this masterclass, Mashrur Haider breaks down how distillation, a popular post-training technique, can cut inference costs by up to 70% while maintaining enterprise-grade performance. You’ll learn how distillation compares to quantization and fine-tuning, seeing real benchmarks. Key takeaways: Distillation 101: How it works and why enterprises use it. Benchmarks: Cost savings without accuracy trade-offs. Workflow: From data prep to deployment on Nebius Token Factory. Scaling: Running distilled models in production with compliance and reliability.

Mashrur Haider is a Tech PM at Nebius AI Studio with a deep healthcare background (BSc Genetics, Stony Brook; MSc Bioinformatics & ML, University of Amsterdam). He’s researched at Netherlands Cancer Institute, worked in Advanced R&D at Philips IGT Systems, and operated a VC-backed techbio startup. At Nebius Token Factory, he translates real customer needs into scalable, user-friendly products aimed at model customisation and dedicated inference.

Directions
The venue for this meetup is AI House Amsterdam located at the Prosus Global Headquarters (Gustav Mahlerplein 5, 1082 MS Amsterdam). AI House Amsterdam is conveniently located next to the train station Amsterdam Zuid (3 minutes walking).