Five conference brands under one roof at a converted Budapest railway workshop: two days on AI, data, product, UX and engineering leadership, in English, hybrid.
A two-day practitioner conference in Budapest that runs five parallel tracks under one roof: AI/ML, Data, Product, UX/UI and Engineering Leadership. The organiser calls the format a 5in1 conference, because Compass merges five conference brands CraftHub had run separately: Amuse (UX, since 2015), Crunch (data, since 2015), Stretch (leadership), Impact (product) and Reinforce (AI, since 2019). The 2026 line is "From idea to impact", and the site's own slogan is "No BS, only building".
1 to 2 October 2026, preceded by a full day of pre-conference masterclasses on 30 September. Eiffel Art Studios (Eiffel Műhelyház), Kőbányai út 30, 1101 Budapest, Hungary, a 19th-century railway maintenance hall built between 1884 and 1886 and now the Hungarian State Opera's rehearsal and production centre.
CraftHub, an event company registered in Budapest as CraftHub Kft. Károly Varga is founder and chief executive, Gergely Hodicska co-founder and expert lead, Médea Baccifava founder and head of relationships, Gergő Tikos chief revenue officer and Daria Schirrmeister speaker coordinator. CraftHub also runs hackathons, developer competitions and workshops, and created the Compass brand in 2023 as the merger of its five earlier conferences.
1,300 or more, a figure CraftHub publishes without stating how it is counted. The audience is product managers, UX designers, software engineers, ML engineers, data scientists and engineering leads building AI-powered products. The organiser's own participant profile gives a split of 68 per cent men and 32 per cent women, and names Hungary, Germany, Slovakia, Serbia, Romania, Austria and the United Kingdom as the countries attendees come from, so the room is Central and Eastern European first.
Published roster as of 9 September 2026, with the site stating that more names are still to come. Eight keynote speakers:
Fifty-five names appear on the full speaker page, the eight keynotes included:
Two names circulated in the Hungarian press coverage of August 2026, Dr Laura Herman of Adobe and a Zalando speaker, appear nowhere on the published roster and are treated here as unconfirmed.
Three changes, all verifiable against the organiser's own archive. The event is renamed: it was Compass Tech Summit from 2023 to 2024, and compasstechsummit.com now redirects to the 2026 site. The venue moves: the 2023 and 2024 editions were held at the Hungarian Railway Museum, and 2026 moves to Eiffel Art Studios. And the five-track format returns after a year off: there was no five-track Compass in 2025, only two smaller single-topic events, Compass AI & Data Summit on 12 to 13 November 2025 at the Uránia National Film Theater (400 or more attendees) and Compass UX Session on 27 November 2025 at the EPAM Systems office (250 or more attendees). New for 2026: an Innovation Stage alongside the five tracks, an AI/ML track carrying Bosch's name, an online ticket, and four application-based community programmes.
Six stages: AI/ML by Bosch, Data, Engineering Leadership, Product, UX/UI and an Innovation Stage. Day one runs 09:50 to 17:55, day two 09:25 to 16:35, and the pre-conference masterclasses run 09:00 to 17:00 on 30 September. Session topics published so far include agentic engineering and context engineering, retrieval augmented generation in production, event-driven and multi-region architecture, GPU parallelism, data platforms and analytics engineering, conversational and emotional design, inclusive design, product management and success metrics, monetisation, hiring and team structures. Sessions are tagged beginner to advanced, and the agenda can be filtered by stage, topic and level.
Keynotes from the eight named keynote speakers, talks of 45 to 90 minutes on the six stages, full-day pre-conference masterclasses, shorter 90-minute onsite workshops, a hallway track named in the ticket description, and a networking party on the first evening that one-day ticket holders can also attend. No B2B matchmaking tool and no advance meeting scheduler are described anywhere on the site, and none is recorded in the index.
Four pre-conference masterclasses on 30 September, each running a full day: "Beyond RAG: From Demo to Production-Grade Context Blocks" (Raj Navakoti, IKEA), "Success Metrics with and without AI" (Büşra Coşkuner, Producteer), "Building High-Performance Teams, Guided by Psychology" (Joseph Pelrine) and "AI-Native Product Strategy" (Daria Tarawneh, SAP). CraftHub also runs free public meetups around the conference: a Tech Leaders' Forum at KLUSTER Coworking on 25 August 2026, an HR360° meetup at Create26 on 9 September 2026 held in Hungarian, and a Tech Leaders Track special edition at Eiffel Art Studios on the evening of 1 October 2026. The conference party on the first evening is included in the ticket, with three alcoholic drinks. No awards ceremony is organised.
All prices are in euros and exclude 27 per cent Hungarian VAT. The general in-person ticket is 589 EUR at the Late Bird rate. That rate holds until 14 September 2026, after which the Lazy Bird rate of 699 EUR applies; the Early Bird rate was 399 EUR until 30 March and the regular rate 499 EUR until 15 June, so the current price is not the standard price. Other in-person tiers at the same Late Bird stage: group of five or more 529 EUR, team of ten or more 469 EUR, Equality ticket 819 EUR valid for two people of different genders, Individual ticket 299 EUR for private buyers only, Small Business ticket 379 EUR for companies under 250,000 EUR of revenue. The university ticket for students and professors is 109 EUR. The online-only ticket is 199 EUR. A workshop add-on is 399 EUR, and the conference plus workshop combo is 928 EUR. Payment is by card, PayPal or bank transfer; invoices are requested at hello@crafthub.events. Four community programmes give free passes by application: Tech Leaders (up to two passes), Startup (up to two passes for startups under 250,000 EUR revenue and 2 million EUR raised), Access (one pass) and Women in Tech by MSCI, which awards ten in-person and ten online passes.
The 2026 call for speakers closed on 30 April 2026 and ran through a Google form. The form link is still published on every page of the site, at forms.gle/a54R4eu3tyiXCddi6, so a submission now is a candidacy for a later edition rather than for October. Daria Schirrmeister is the speaker coordinator named by the organiser; no dedicated speaker address is published, and hello@crafthub.events is the general route. No fee or expense policy for speakers is disclosed.
Sponsorship goes through sales@crafthub.events, with a brochure available on request from the sponsors page. The organiser offers exhibition booths, sponsored tech talks, presence at networking events and named track sponsorship, the AI/ML stage being carried by Bosch in 2026. Five levels exist in practice: Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze and a Women in Tech Partner slot. No price is published for any level, and no floor plan or exhibitor count is published either.
Twenty sponsors across four levels, plus one named partnership, as published on the sponsors page.
Platinum:
Gold:
Silver:
Bronze:
Women in Tech Partner:
Professional partners, a separate and non-commercial category: Helló Magyar (media partner), Daily News Hungary (media partner), Startup Hungary, AVK Podcast, Rentit, Dev Events, AI Pressroom (media partner), AIML Events and DevIT Jobs.
No attendee breakdown by company type is published: the organiser's participants page shows a company-size chart with no readable values. What the sponsor and speaker rosters show is three clusters. Enterprise IT and industry: Bosch, SAP Hungary, IBM, EPAM, Deutsche Telekom IT Solutions, ALDI SÜD Innovation, IKEA. Finance and insurance: OTP Bank, Wise, MSCI, Prima, Swedbank. Data and developer infrastructure: Cloudera, Confluent, Databricks, GitGuardian, LocalStack, Superhuman, incident.io. Consumer marketplaces are present through speakers rather than sponsors: Vinted, Bolt, Miro, monday.com, Elsevier, HubSpot. That is a corporate product-engineering room, not a venture-stage startup room.
Not publicly disclosed. The site has no press or media page, and a search on the site for "press", "media" and "accreditation" returns nothing; the terms and conditions mention only attendees, speakers, sponsors and volunteers. The only published route is the general address hello@crafthub.events. Note that attendance carries a blanket consent to be filmed and photographed, which the terms state without exception.
Six Hungarian outlets covered the 2026 edition between 25 August and 2 September 2026, all carrying substantially the same text: Prím Online (hirek.prim.hu, 25 August, no byline), Techmonitor.hu (27 August), Cseppek.hu (25 August), PC Pult, Tiéd a Világ, and Helló Magyar (media partner) on 2 September. The articles all lead on the same five names: Bryce Johnson of Microsoft as designer of the Xbox Adaptive Controller, Bryce Adelstein Lelbach of NVIDIA, Dejan Menges of Vinted, Oleksandra Bovkun of Databricks and Joseph Pelrine. No coverage in the international technology press was found.
Weak as evidence, and easy to sort into levels. Placed: Helló Magyar (media partner), Daily News Hungary (media partner) and AI Pressroom (media partner) are listed by the organiser as professional partners of the event, so their coverage is contractual. Independent but promotional: Prím Online, Techmonitor.hu, Cseppek.hu, PC Pult and Tiéd a Világ published the same release without a byline or added reporting. Claimed by the organiser without proof: the attendance, speaker and sponsor counters. None of the six articles carries an attendance figure, an audit, or a single line of independent verification, so no level of genuinely independent coverage exists for this edition.
Because splitting them did not work. In 2025 CraftHub ran Compass as two narrow events, a data and AI summit for 400 people and a UX day for 250, and neither reached the scale the combined 2023 and 2024 editions had. The organiser's public argument for merging is the better one anyway: AI projects fail on shared goals, data foundations and user experience rather than on models, which is an argument for putting the product manager, the designer and the data engineer in the same building. The 5in1 format is the format that matches that claim, and the 2026 track list, one of which is an Innovation Stage cutting across the other five, is the organiser taking its own argument seriously.
Because it does not survive contact with the speaker page. The index and the earlier version of this record both credited speakers from Google, Adobe and Spotify. On 9 September 2026 the published roster contains no Adobe employee at all; Google and Spotify appear only as former employers of one product trainer, Nesrine Changuel. The Adobe name entered through an August press release naming Dr Laura Herman, who is not on the roster. A logo wall assembled from press releases is not a line-up, and this is a small, checkable example of how a conference acquires prestige it has not booked.
Researchers looking for peer review or published proceedings: this is a practitioner event with no academic track. Anyone who needs an exhibition floor to tour, or scheduled buyer-seller meetings: there are sponsor booths but no matchmaking tool and no advance scheduler. Anyone wanting sustained depth on one subject: with six stages and talks of 45 to 90 minutes over two days, the design favours breadth. And anyone booking on the strength of the big logos in the press coverage rather than the published roster, since the two do not match.
It is the Central and Eastern European anchor of the early-October week, and the annual cycle has held that slot since 2023: 5 to 6 October 2023, 2 to 4 October 2024, 1 to 2 October 2026, with the one break being the missing five-track edition in 2025. The organiser's own attendee-country list, led by Hungary with Germany, Slovakia, Serbia, Romania, Austria and the United Kingdom behind it, places it as a regional gathering rather than a pan-European one. No sourced comparison against the larger western European AI or developer conferences exists in the material checked, and none is asserted here.
No. Every event carrying the Compass name has been held in Budapest. The sister formats are Compass AI & Data Summit, run in 2024 and 2025 at the Uránia National Film Theater for 400 or more data and AI professionals, Compass UX Session, run in 2024 and 2025 as a one-day UX event for 250 or more people, and a one-day Compass AI Session held with Bosch at the Bosch Budapest Innovation Campus in 2024. CraftHub runs no Compass edition abroad.
English. The organiser states in its own FAQ that the event is international and that all talks are held in English. The exception is one associated free meetup, the HR360° session of 9 September 2026, which was announced as running in Hungarian.
Yes to both. The organiser describes the event as hybrid. An online-only ticket costs 199 EUR plus 27 per cent VAT and gives real-time viewing, networking on the online platform and rewatching afterwards; it does not admit you in person. All sessions are recorded, and recordings and slides are shared after the event with ticket holders only, and only for the speakers who authorised it.
All payments are non-refundable, in the words of the ticket terms. A ticket may be transferred to someone else up to 14 days before the event start, and is non-transferable after that, and tickets cannot be handed over to another person during the event itself. No refund is granted for a cancelled speaker, a full room or any other disruption. If CraftHub cannot hold or has to postpone the event for reasons outside its control, it may either keep the fee as credit for a future event or reimburse, at its own discretion. Claims arising from the contract must be brought within six months.
Not publicly disclosed. The site publishes no accessibility statement, no step-free access note and no contact for access requirements, and the venue page covers transport and parking only. The code of conduct forbids harassment on grounds including disability, which is a behaviour rule and not a statement about physical access. The building is a restored 1880s railway hall converted for the Hungarian State Opera, so access should be confirmed with the organiser before booking.
Trams 28, 28A and 62 and buses 9 and 217E all stop at Eiffel Műhelyház, at the venue door. Free parking exists in the museum lot but the organiser warns that spaces are very limited and that street parking nearby fills quickly, and recommends public transport. Taxis and ride-hailing drop passengers at the entrance; the name to give a driver is Eiffel Műhelyház, not the street address.
Official site: https://compassaitechsummit.com/. Tickets are sold through ti.to/crafthub/compass-ai-tech-summit-2026. The organiser's own site is crafthub.events. The domain compasstechsummit.com, used formerly under the previous name, now redirects to the current site. General enquiries and invoice requests go to hello@crafthub.events, and sponsorship to sales@crafthub.events. Named contacts on record: Károly Varga and Gergely Hodicska for direction, Gergő Tikos and Médea Baccifava for commercial matters, Daria Schirrmeister for speakers.