Reply presents Atena Reply
Together with special guest LangChain, this event will be an opportunity to explore how to turn domain expertise, specialised LLM training and harness engineering into a tangible competitive advantage, through Atena Reply’s vision and approach.
Custom AI, training and deployment for business
At a time when relying on general-purpose models is no longer enough, the real challenge is not simply adopting AI, but managing its lifecycle over time. An organisation’s distinctive knowledge, together with the way generative AI is used internally, becomes the most concrete lever for building custom AI models — from domain-specific LLMs to specialised SLMs designed for specific operational and agentic workflows: models that are more cost-efficient and easier to control.
With expertise in synthetic dataset curation and generation, large-scale LLM training, SLM distillation, AI product Ops, evals, constrained knowledge distillation, deployment and serving with optimised configurations on HPC and compute clusters, Atena Reply supports organisations in developing custom generative models through a structured triage process. This approach makes it possible to assess the maturity of the ecosystem in which the organisation operates, compare the models best suited to real-world use cases across new variants and LLM deprecations, and create verifiable RL environments starting from unstructured expert knowledge.
Event Overview
Atena Reply’s launch event, “Own the AI Lifecycle, Don’t Rent It: Why Domain Knowledge Is the Real Competitive Advantage”, will take place on 29 April, from 5:00 PM to 7:30 PM, at the Reply offices in Milan, Via Robert Koch 1/4.
During the event, we will present Atena Reply’s positioning, areas of expertise and distinctive approach, with a focus on the main challenges organisations face today when using SLMs and LLMs — whether open-weight or proprietary — in a way that is governable, measurable and sustainable over time.
Through concrete examples, we will show how these models can enable a more robust approach to generative AI and how LLM engineering platforms can play a central role in LLM Ops journeys.
The event will also feature Marco Perini, First FDE in Europe at LangChain, who will introduce the LangSmith platform through an enterprise use case.
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LangChain is an open-source framework for building AI applications and agents powered by LLMs. It is designed to connect models with data, databases and external tools, while also supporting testing, evaluation and production deployment.
Agenda
17:00
Registration & Welcome Coffee
17:30
Introduction to Atena Reply
17:45
Vision, real-world examples and application areas
18:45
Networking Cocktail
What we will explore
Sovereign AI factory
How to reduce dependency on major vendors in the US and China by building AI solutions that remain fully under the organisation’s control, maintainable and sustainable over time.
Domain knowledge as a strategic asset
How to turn methodologies, processes and an organisation’s distinctive knowledge into the key asset for creating verifiable RL environments and specialised models, building a competitive advantage in the use of AI compared with general-purpose foundation models.
Custom LLMs: training, post-training and distillation
When and why to develop specialised models for specific domains, tasks and workflows, with an approach focused on performance, efficiency and scalability.
AI product Ops, evaluation and deployment
How to compare models against real use cases, plan LLM transitions and manage deprecations, bringing AI solutions into production in a way that is measurable and operationally ready.