Speed. Data. AI. Three terms that defined June 12, 2026, at the Literaturhaus München and show how fundamentally Artificial Intelligence is changing healthcare.
At the DLD Health x BAIOSPHERE, over 500 experts from science, business, medicine, and politics came together to discuss exactly this transformation: How do we detect diseases before they break out? How do machines learn what happens in our brains? And who actually owns our data or perhaps one day our thoughts?
For the first time, Steffi Czerny and Alessia Sinzger jointly invited as the new DLD dual leadership together with Michael Klimke, CEO of BAIOSPHERE (AGENCY) to the event.
Fabian Theis, Director of the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich and chairman of the Bavarian AI Council, set the professional initial impulse. His message became the day's credo: We must move from Sick Care to Health Care. The future of health needs everyone, AI research, clinics, and entrepreneurship together. The political framework of the day was set by Bavaria's Prime Minister Dr. Markus Söder and Science Minister Markus Blume. Both made it clear: Technology and technology today determine prosperity and competitiveness. Söder emphasized that it is about building one's own research identity and developing business models from it. Blume referred to the economic weight of the topic: According to current forecasts, the global AI health market grows to $500 billion by 2032. Bavaria's response is concrete: Investments in computing capacity, a joint foundation model, and the Bavarian Health Cloud as a platform for patient data.
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The DLD Health x BAIOSPHERE united Nobel laureates, AI pioneers, and decision-makers from science, business, and politics. Alongside Bavaria's Science Minister Markus Blume, Nobel laureate Ferenc Krausz, AI pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber, AI researcher Björn Ommer (LMU), and Susan Thomas from Google Health discussed the future of health and innovation. Actor Philipp Hochmair designed the cultural prelude with an electronic interpretation of Goethe's "Erlkönig".
A highlight of the morning was the keynote by Bavaria's Prime Minister Markus Söder. He emphasized the importance of technological innovations for health, prosperity, and competitiveness and highlighted Bavaria's investments in future fields such as AI, Bio Life Sciences, Defense Tech, and aerospace.
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One of the most moving moments of the day was the panel on the brain-computer interface. For the first time, Prof. Dr. Bernhard Meyer, Director of Neurosurgery at TUM Klinikum, Prof. Dr. Simon Jacob, Professor for Translational Neurotechnology (TUM), and their patient Michael Mehringer stood together before an audience.
Mehringer is paralyzed from the neck down. In July 2025, he became the first person in Europe to have a brain-computer interface with 256 microelectrodes implanted. Since then, he has been working with a team of neuroscience, neurosurgery, robotics, and AI to regain more control step by step through his thoughts. Meyer and Jacob are not unknown in this field: As early as 2022, they implanted such an interface in a stroke patient with severe aphasia worldwide for the first time.
Bavarian AI research is networking
At DLD Health x BAIOSPHERE, leading researchers of the Bavarian AI Basic Model Initiative met with leaders from medicine, technology, and business – and introduced Dr. Jan Smeddinck as the new managing director of the initiative.
The project team (from left to right): Dr. Jan Smeddinck (Managing Director of the Initiative), Nadine Hildebrandt (Community Management), Dr. Michael Klimke (Managing Director Bavarian AI Agency), Prof. Björn Ommer (Scientific Director), Prof. Wolfram Burgard (Scientific Director), Dr. Christoph Langenhan (Science Manager) and Prof. Eckehard Steinbach, Cluster Speaker Robotics and Perception. Not pictured: Prof. Bernhard Kainz, Cluster Speaker Health, and Dr. Susanne Schröder-Bergen (Science Manager)
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Videos of DLD Health x BAIOSPHERE
Highlights from the BAIOSPHERE
Prof. Dr. Andreas Maier, Chair for Pattern Recognition, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg (Member Bavarian AI Council) asked in his talk "What's Next in Medical AI?" and immediately provided the answer: agentic AI accelerates research radically. The programming of an MRI scanner, which previously required specialized physics training, is done by an agentic system today in minutes. A textbook that meant four years of work was created in six weeks. What used to take years now takes weeks.
Prof. Dr. Björn Eskofier, Chair for AI in Medicine, LMU Munich (Member Bavarian AI Council) moderated the panel "Unleashing the Power of Health Data" with Mervi Siltanen (Findata, Finland) and Guillaume Wendt (Novartis Germany). The core message: Europe sits on one of the world's largest healthcare data treasures but does not yet use it consistently. Finland, with Findata, shows how central, transparent data access can work for research. By 2029, every EU country should have a comparable structure. Agreement in the panel: The data belongs to the patients, and those who are too slow in using it lose the connection.
Prof. Dr. Julia Schnabel (TUM | Helmholtz Munich) and Prof. Dr. Carsten Marr (LMU | Helmholtz Munich) discussed in the panel moderated by Dr. Michael Klimke, CEO of the Bavarian AI Agency BAIOSPHERE, "From Pixel to Patient" together with Dr. Jan Wöpking, Executive Director of the Munich Medicine Alliance M1, on how AI finds its way from the lab into everyday clinical practice. Schnabel made it clear: AI combines image data, patient history, and genetic information into an overall picture, enabling the discovery of new patterns. Marr identified the real problem: not the research, but the implementation. Helmholtz already employs five AI consultants who specifically build the bridge between science and everyday clinical practice. Dr. Wöpking added: The Munich Medicine Alliance M1 brings together LMU, TUM, and the major Munich clinics for the first time in a structured manner, with the goal of a shared clinical data center. Schnabel's conclusion: AI will not replace doctors but will stand by their side as a reliable copilot.
Prof. Dr. Janina Beilner (Siemens) broadened the view to an often underrated dimension: healthcare is critical infrastructure. The healthcare industry is the most frequently hacked globally, and caregivers spend 72 minutes per shift searching for equipment instead of patient care. AI-based tracking already halves this time today. Beilner's message: Resilient healthcare does not begin only in the lab but also in the building, in the power grid, and in the everyday life of caregivers.
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DLD Health x BAIOSPHERE
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Discussion on the future of artificial intelligence with Prof. Dr. Björn Ommer and Prof. Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber
A conversation about the current state and future of AI with Jakob von Lindern, Prof. Dr. Björn Ommer and Prof. Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber (from left to right) | © Philipp Guelland for DLD / Burda