iCoSys Leads Open Source AI Workshop on Graph-Based AI Agents

The iCoSys team, in collaboration with SCAI – Swiss Center for Augmented Intelligence (Swiss Center for Augmented Intelligence) and HumanTech Institute, led an Open Source AI Workshop organized by CH Open, titled  “Designing Thinking Machines with Graph-Based AI Agents”.

Led by Ornella Vaccarelli and Federica Bove.

 

The context

As AI adoption accelerates, organizations increasingly seek solutions that guarantee data sovereignty, reduce reliance on cloud hyperscalers, and maintain full control over sensitive information.

Open-source LLMs, combined with advanced retrieval techniques, offer a viable path toward deploying intelligent applications entirely on-premises.

 

The workshop

The highly interactive workshop explored how to build AI assistants that extract structured facts from local documents, make them searchable, and support decision-making – all running locally without cloud dependencies.

Participants worked hands-on with:

• Local LLMs – running open-source models directly on personal hardware

• RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) – improving accuracy by grounding responses in provided documents

• Graph-RAG – building knowledge graphs to capture complex relationships and enhance traceability

The session was enriched by a highly skilled audience, fostering dynamic exchanges between AI researchers, developers, and domain experts.

 

Key takeaways

• Open-source LLMs are now mature enough to deliver practical, high-quality results when run locally on standard hardware.

• Graph-RAG significantly improves the traceability of AI outputs, reduces hallucinations, and keeps results constrained to the relevant domain.

• Local AI deployment offers full independence from cloud costs, availability constraints, and data leakage risks.

 

To retain

Building thinking machines doesn’t require massive cloud infrastructure.

By combining open-source models, structured knowledge graphs, and local execution, iCoSys demonstrated a replicable blueprint for transparent, sovereign, and efficient AI systems.

📅 The same workshop will be presented again at the Workshop-Tage 2026 in Rapperswil, as part of the celebration of 35 years of CH Open. Do not miss it!

👉 Register here: https://lnkd.in/eGKFjY8B