Switzerland's AI Movement Is About to Start | Swiss {ai} Weeks
Katka Letzing and Anna Hakobyan on Swiss {ai} Weeks, open language models and turning Switzerland's research strength into responsible applied AI.
Discuss this episode and meet other Swiss tech builders in the TechDrive WhatsApp group.
Key insights: executive summary
- Switzerland's AI advantage is public and open: sovereign, openly released Swiss language models trained on national supercomputing infrastructure.
- Swiss {ai} Weeks exists to convert research capability into applied adoption by companies, cantons and communities across the country.
- The AI movement in Switzerland is deliberately decentralised, with hackathons and events in multiple language regions rather than one Zurich-only showcase.
- For executives, the practical opportunity is applied AI on proprietary data, not building foundation models.
- Community infrastructure, maker spaces and hackathons remain the cheapest talent pipeline the Swiss tech ecosystem has.
“Switzerland will not win AI by out-spending the hyperscalers. It wins by making trustworthy, open models usable inside real Swiss businesses.”
“A movement is what happens when the events stop being the point and the projects that come out of them become the point.”
What is the Swiss AI movement and why does it matter now?
Switzerland combines national supercomputing capacity, open model releases from ETH Zurich and EPFL, and a dense industrial base that owns high-value proprietary data. Swiss {ai} Weeks connects those three by getting builders, corporates and public bodies working on the same problems in the same weeks.
How can companies in Switzerland adopt AI without building models?
The realistic path for most Swiss and DACH companies is applied AI: retrieval over internal knowledge, workflow automation and domain-specific evaluation. Sovereign open models make that possible without shipping sensitive data outside the country.
Start where the data already lives
The highest-return projects sit on data a company already owns and already trusts.
Use the community as a filter
Hackathons and deep tech maker spaces surface which ideas survive contact with an actual dataset.
Who is Katka Letzing and Anna Hakobyan?
Katka Letzing and Anna Hakobyan are co-initiators of Swiss {ai} Weeks and leaders at Kickstart Innovation. Together they help connect Switzerland's AI researchers, companies, public bodies and communities.
Episode show notes
A first for TechDrive Zürich: two guests in the car at the same time. Katka Letzing and Anna Hakobyan co-initiated Swiss {ai} Weeks, five weeks of AI events across the country with more than 200 partners and more than 200 events. The conversation was recorded two weeks before the programme opened.
What stood out was how much of the discussion centred on restraint: why generating ten pages in two minutes does not mean you should, why simply leading with AI no longer looks clever, and why piloting a tool is very different from scaling it responsibly.
More conversations from the Swiss tech ecosystem
- Nobody Has Left a Robot Working Overnight | Yulia Sandamirskaya, ZHAWYulia Sandamirskaya, ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences
- Physical AI Is Ready, Buildings Are Not | Kateryna Portmann, ANYboticsKateryna Portmann, ANYbotics
- Five Years to Teach a Robot Table Tennis | Mireille El Gheche, Sony AIMireille El Gheche, Sony AI
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