Fresh off my jaunt to AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe last week, I headed back to Amsterdam for the first European installment of the artificial intelligence-focused HumanX conference so I could meet with another round of AI startups.

As always, my goal was to uncover the untold stories of innovation across the software landscape – and HumanX Amsterdam 2026 didn’t disappoint. Despite all the crazy hype around AI these days, I found several vendors that were laser-focused on delivering differentiated business value with their innovations, with the goal of helping their customer base move forward with their AI initiatives.

In other words, the 10 vendors below are driving their customers to close the gap between their eyes (desire for AI) and their stomachs (their ability to deploy real solutions into production).

Here is my list, in alphabetical order:

8wave Oy offers a platform that connects all of an organization’s AI activities by tracking the lineage of the underlying data feeding the various AI applications. The result is “enterprise resource planning or ERP for AI operations” that connects AI activities to the key performance indicators or KPIs important to the business.

8wave’s key innovation: The company has updated the notion of data lineage to “AI lineage,” connecting underlying data to the organization’s core business drivers via AI.

Bosun B.V. leverages AI to automate software maintenance across legacy codebases, supporting security fixes, dependency updates and some legacy migration activities. The company tracks the behavior of each legacy asset with a parity file that enables the organization to compare the behavior of the original and updated applications.

Bosun’s key innovation: the parity file tracks the behavior of each legacy application via its inputs and outputs in a human-readable and modifiable format that enables organizations to move forward with patches and updates while lowering the risk of breaking something.

Clarifeye SAS offers an “AI consultant” that conducts interviews with experts across an organization to collect the tribal knowledge locked in people’s heads. It then combines this knowledge with other sources of information across to help companies build process maps, business rules and playbooks that accurately represent the actual behaviors of the business.

Clarifeye’s key innovation: Many AI platforms today can extract information from digital sources like documents, databases, applications and the like. Clarifeye complements these sources of information with the hard-to-reach tribal knowledge that represents how businesses actually operate.

Distil labs GmbH simplifies the creation of small (or specialized) language models or SLMs, enabling its customers to dramatically lower token costs vs. large language models or LLMs. Distil iteratively fine tunes an existing model, leveraging corporate and synthetic data to train and deploy customized SLMs that meet specific business requirements.

Distil labs’ key innovation: The company’s automated, iterative approach for creating SLMs works for any use case and any customer, as opposed to the prebuilt SLMs on the market that can only deliver specific, fixed value propositions.

Reasoning Engines B.V., doing business as LangWatch, provides simulation-based AI agent testing and evaluation. At the core of the LangWatch offering are agents that simulate human behavior as they interact with an application under test. LangWatch is then able to iteratively write and improve the tests based upon its output and can also use these tests as agent evaluations or evals (see my recent article on the importance of evals for ensuring proper agentic behavior).

LangWatch’s key innovation: In addition to simulated users, LangWatch is an early adopter of the new Jev AI model from TypeSafe AI, Inc. Jev promises to dramatically accelerate agentic evals and the associated LLM-as-a-Judge capabilities, resolving the primary roadblock to agentic evaluation.

Orq.ai Holding B.V. offers an agentic AI development and deployment platform that combines centralized agentic governance combined with decentralized, domain-specific agentic delivery capabilities.

The centralized portion of the Orq.ai offering serves as an agentic center of excellence or CoE, offering organization-wide governance capabilities including policies, guardrails, and audit trails. Under the purview of this CoE, individual teams across the organization can leverage any agentic technologies to build whatever agents or applications they require, while remaining compliant with the CoE’s guidelines and requirements.

Orq.ai’s key innovation: The company leverages platform engineering best practices within its dual-platform architecture, where the platform engineering team establishes the golden path of favored tooling for distributed teams to leverage, thus balancing centralized governance priorities with diverse business needs.

Safe Intelligence Ltd. offers a platform for iteratively testing agentic applications to eliminate failure conditions, thus enabling organizations to improve the resilience of such applications.

Safe’s testing tools run through numerous test cases, identifying which cases result in failures, and then identifying the underlying cause of each failure. Safe then makes recommendations on fixes to improve the resilience of the applications with each iteration.

Safe Intelligence’s key innovation: Safe identifies a range of different causes of failures, including issues with underlying models or excessive or misaligned governance guardrails, as well as the business logic and vibe coding issues that other testing tools can identify.

Softr Platforms GmbH offers a no-code platform for creating portals, internal tools, and other applications by providing enterprise-class back-end capabilities including scalable deployment, security and access control, and policy enforcement.

As with other no-code tools that predate the generative AI wave, Softr offers a visual development environment. However, most of Softr’s current customers bring their coding agent of choice to the platform, leveraging Softr to provide the back-end infrastructure necessary to safely deploy vibe coded applications into production.

Softr’s key innovation: Generative AI essentially torpedoed the entire low-code/no-code marketplace by giving citizen developers a simple chat interface as a simple alternative for building applications. Softr survived this bloodbath by emphasizing how well its back end supports such vibe coded applications.

Tekst.ai BV leverages AI to reinvent the process mining marketplace by analyzing all mailboxes in an organization that deal with customer-facing requests. By combining this customer-centric information with traditional process mining sources like databases and API calls, Tekst is able to deliver process intelligence that is more accurate than competing process mining tools can offer in a dramatically shorter timeframe.

Tekst’s key innovation: By incorporating unstructured data into the process mining landscape, Tekst gives organizations more accurate and complete insights into their running processes in near real-time.

Unfold AI Products Ltd., doing business as UnfoldAI, leverages various technologies to extract information from closed (or mostly closed) systems and then normalizes that data for consumption via the model context protocol or MCP. It can access APIs, databases, network traffic and underlying file systems, and also incorporates documentation to provide and collate the data it organizes for consuming applications.

UnfoldAI’s key innovation: UnfoldAI’s offering is essentially AI middleware: an unsexy but essential type of infrastructure software. In UnfoldAI’s case, its ability to connect to data sources from closed systems gives organizations access to otherwise inaccessible data essential for building successful AI applications.

The Intellyx take

The 10 vendors in this list have two characteristics in common:

First, they are all driving innovation in AI, focusing on enabling their customers to derive business value from their AI initiatives.

Second: They are all European. True, this installment of HumanX is a European conference, but all European AI conferences (HumanX included) host numerous vendors from the U.S. and other countries.

Nor did I take location into account when I assembled this list. Rather, European vendors rose to the top of the list organically, based upon their ability to innovate.

This explosion of European innovation in AI is in part the result of European companies’ sovereignty requirements – both as a result of regulations, but more a recognition that the United States is no longer a safe place to do business.

America’s loss, therefore, is Europe’s gain, as the continent is now driving AI innovation for the world, despite all the hype around battles between the U.S. and China over frontier models.

Don’t let the hullabaloo confuse you. Look to Europe for AI innovation that connects AI strategies to solutions that deliver business value in production.

Jason Bloomberg is founder and managing director of Intellyx, which advises business leaders and technology vendors on their digital transformation strategies. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE. A human wrote every word of this article.

Photo: Jason Bloomberg