German Creative Economy Summit 2026

The German Creative Economy Summit is back for its third edition, and this year, the question in every room is the same: What happens to an industry built on human creativity when machines start doing the creating?

What is gces?

The GCES is Germany’s leading congress for the creative economy, a gathering of creators: musicians, designers, architects, journalists, advertising creatives, and the policymakers and investors who either support or complicate their work.

Organised by the Hamburg Kreativ Gesellschaft, Germany’s largest public creative industries body, the summit is built on a clear premise. The creative industries are too fragmented, and too often invisible in the conversations that shape economic and digital policy. The GCES exists to change that.

And this year the theme was Artificial Intelligence and the Digital Economy.

The central question

What happens to a sector when its core asset, creativity, becomes automatable?

That question hung over every panel, every hallway conversation, every workshop. The summit structured the tension across four thematic tracks:

Policy: copyright law, platform regulation, and democratic accountability in the AI era
Markets & Capital: new business models, monetisation strategies, and the economics of the creator economy
Creative Futures: what new professional profiles are emerging, how education must adapt, and what creative work will look like in a decade
Impact: how creative industries can use digital tools to drive social transformation, inclusion, and sustainability

On the stages: Talks, panels and conversations

The summit opened with statements from political and industry leaders that framed what would follow. Egbert Rühl, CEO of Hamburg Kreativ Gesellschaft, welcomed attendees before Dr. Carsten Brosda (Hamburg’s Senator for Culture and Media), Gitta Connemann (Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy), and Björn Böhning (State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Finance) each took the stage in quick succession. Wolfram Weimer, Federal Minister of State for Culture and the Media, joined via digital address.

The message was consistent: the creative sector is not a soft cultural add-on. It is an economic force that deserves a seat at the table where AI governance is being designed.

The afternoon went hands-on. A series of rapid-fire impulse talks addressed the operational reality of AI for creative professionals: Nina Matzat on AI agents and how they go beyond standard generative tools; Dr Paul Elvers (FUNKE media group) on how AI is becoming editorial infrastructure at scale and Jenny Habermehl on what the shift means specifically for solo freelancers, who face these pressures with the least institutional support. A closing panel brought these three together with Holger Volland to connect the dots between workflow changes and new value creation models.

The day closed with artist and AI provocateur Boris Eldagsen in conversation with host Tamara Güçlü, in a session titled “Zoom Out, Brain!”, exploring what creatives already intuitively feel about AI but haven’t yet fully rationalised. It was an apt note to end on: honest about the discomfort, but refusing to be paralysed by it.

Day two opened with Balbina, the Berlin-based musician, asking what remains of human pop when algorithms increasingly decide what gets heard and what gets buried. It was one of the summit’s most quietly powerful moments.

Miriam Davoudvandi followed in conversation, discussing what it means to hold many creative roles at once and how to build a coherent public voice across them. Nathanael Liminski, Minister for European Affairs of North Rhine-Westphalia, delivered a political statement before Caroline Norbury examined a structural question the sector rarely addresses head-on: how public funding can be used to actually lever private investment in creative industries, rather than simply substituting for it.

Running in parallel on Day Two was a session that brought one of the most concrete use cases of the entire summit. The “Business Value Meets Impact” block gathered four 15-minute impulse talks showing how AI creates measurable social value, not as theory, but as working products.

One of the standout contributions came from Niki de Schryver, CEO and founder of COSH!, who spoke about how the fashion industry, as one of the hardest sectors to change, can use AI and data to drive real-world sustainability. Having built what she describes as the world’s first fully transparent supply chain in fashion, Niki showed how AI-powered tools can translate consumer behaviour into city-level impact data. The argument was simple but pointed: transparency and creativity are not opposites but they are a competitive advantage.

It was a rare moment in the programme where fashion, usually treated as an aesthetic industry rather than a data economy, was positioned squarely at the intersection of AI, sustainability, and business value.

What attendees took home

One representative voice, from Bochum Economic Development, summarised it this way: generative tools are efficiency levers, not job killers, but the solutions to the challenges they create won’t come from Brussels or Berlin alone. They will come from cities, regional networks, and municipalities that have the courage to act concretely.

That regional dimension, the gap between the grand stages of policy and the ground-level reality of a freelance illustrator or an independent record label, was perhaps the summit’s most honest recurring theme.

Want to read more? You can find several of our previous events recaps here:

The German Creative Economy Summit 2026 took place on 28 – 29 April at Kampnagel, Hamburg. It was organised by the Hamburg Kreativ Gesellschaft and funded by the Hamburg Senate Department for Culture and Media. More information at german-creative-economy-summit.de.

Taraneh Intern COSH!