This session delivers a blueprint for building, deploying, and managing agents in a secure, scalable, and cost-effective manner on Google Cloud, bridging the critical gap between development and operations.

When we at Bol decided to personalize campaign banners, we did what many companies do: bought an expensive solution. As a software engineering team with zero data science experience, we integrated a third-party recommender system for €1 million annually, built the cloud infrastructure, and waited for results. After our first season, the data told a harsh truth—the third-party tool wasn't delivering value proportional to its cost. We faced a crossroads: accept mediocrity or build our own solution from scratch, tailored to our requirements and architecture. We'll walk you through our journey of building a more intelligent and flexible recommendation system from the ground up, and how this journey saved us over a million euros per year. We will share the incremental steps that shaped our journey, alongside the valuable lessons learned along the way

Companies today are hungry for external data to stay competitive, but actually getting and making sense of that data isn’t easy. Standard web scraping often produces messy or incomplete results, and modern anti-bot systems make reliable collection even tougher.

In this talk, I’ll share how pairing Python’s scraping frameworks (like Scrapy, Playwright, and Selenium) with AI/ML can turn raw, unstructured data into clear, actionable insights.

We’ll look at:

1) How to build scrapers that still work in 2025.

2) Ways to use AI to automatically clean, enrich, and classify data.

3) Real-world applications of sentiment analysis for reviews and social media.

4) Case studies showing how SMEs have used these pipelines to sharpen marketing and product strategies.

By the end, you’ll see how to design pipelines that don’t just gather data, but deliver real strategic value. The session will focus on practical Python tools, scalable deployment (Airflow, Kubernetes, cloud platforms), and key lessons learned from hands-on projects at the intersection of scraping and AI.