Trustworthy AI is no longer just a vision for the future, but a defining requirement for how modern digital systems are designed, deployed, and governed. The AI Awards 2026 focus precisely on this challenge, highlighting the growing importance of ethics, safety, reliability, and privacy in the development and use of artificial intelligence. The goal of the award is to draw attention to Slovak developers and providers of AI systems and digital innovations, with a strong emphasis on human-centered and ethically grounded AI.
The award is organized by Hopero, the European Digital Innovation Hub in Slovakia, and the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies (KInIT), the first independent AI research institute in Slovakia, while the media partnership of the project is covered by Forbes magazine. From a strong pool of submissions, the evaluation committee selected four finalists for 2026, including Evolveum.
During an interview with KInIT, Martin Mareš, Senior Product Manager at Evolveum, and Anton Tkáčik, Backend Technical Lead and Developer at Evolveum, share insights into midPoint’s AI assistant midPilot and its role in accelerating application onboarding within identity governance and administration.
Can you tell us about your AI system and the problems it helps solve?
Today, up to 80% of cyberattacks exploit vulnerabilities related to user identities. Our open source platform midPoint naturally addresses this problem as a software for identity governance and administration (IGA). However, one of the most critical bottlenecks in deploying IGA solutions remains the onboarding of enterprise systems. Organizations often need to connect hundreds of applications and, for some of them, even develop custom communication interfaces – so-called connectors. This process tends to be both time-consuming and costly, and can significantly extend the implementation of the entire project.
MidPilot, midPoint’s AI assistant, brings a significant acceleration to this process while also reducing the need for deep technical expertise. Organizations thus gain a greater chance of successfully implementing an IGA solution, more efficient identity management, and an overall strengthening of security. The potential of our AI initiative is further confirmed by support from the European Union through Slovakia’s Recovery and Resilience Plan.
AI Awards highlights systems built on the pillars of ethics, reliability, and privacy. Which of these aspects presented the greatest challenge during the development of your solution?
One of the main challenges of our solution is the trustworthiness of the AI service provider. What data is being shared? What happens to it after processing? Where does the entire system run? We operate in the field of cybersecurity, where these questions are even more sensitive and important than in a standard IT environment. That is why we involved our Chief Information Security Officer as well as the compliance department in the processes from the very beginning of the project.
We focused on three key pillars. The first is full transparency: the entire solution, including the default configuration, prompts, documentation, and guides, is published publicly as open source. We hide nothing, and the customer has complete visibility into how the system works. The second is data control, the user interface clearly displays, before each use of AI, what type of data will be sent for processing. The user has the option not to use the AI functionality, and a complete audit of submitted data is available, stored locally on the midPoint side. The third pillar is geopolitical and technological independence, the customer chooses their own architecture and the LLM models they use. The solution can run fully on-premise, it is possible to use our AI service on private servers in the EU, or to integrate other platforms and cloud services according to the organization’s security requirements. There is no vendor lock-in that would restrict the customer. Evolveum itself is a fully European company, built and owned within the EU, which supports adherence to European standards and ethical principles and strengthens technological sovereignty.
What specific mechanisms ensure that your solution remains under human control and stays secure in the long term?
Blind trust in an AI model does not work, hallucinations are a risk, as are targeted attacks such as remote code poisoning. To prevent these risks, we built connector generation on three security principles.
The first is strict guardrails, we do not let artificial intelligence generate arbitrary executable code. Instead, we created a special connector framework, a firmly defined and manually designed foundation into which AI only fills in the specifications of the system being connected. The second is declarative output, the result is not an unpredictable script, but a purely declarative connector. The model does not create program logic, it only describes the parameters and what is to be executed, which significantly reduces the space for introducing vulnerabilities. The third principle is human control. The entire process is designed to be iterative and interactive. The AI assistant gradually generates individual parts, from finding documentation to proposing tests, while the administrator immediately reviews, adjusts, or rejects each step. This reduces cognitive load while keeping full control always on the human side. We have thus turned unpredictable code generation into a secure, managed, and auditable assistance where the human is always in the control loop.
Read the full interview on this page.
Martin Mareš
Senior Product Manager at Evolveum
Martin Mareš is a senior product manager with a strong technical background and a passion for agile methodologies. He has more than 10 years of experience in the software industry, having progressed from backend developer through scrum master to product owner. Martin bridges technical delivery with strategic product vision, and his current challenge is leading the development of the AI assistant midPilot.
Tony Tkáčik
Backend Technical Lead and Developer at Evolveum
Anton Tkáčik has more than 12 years of experience in developing and managing open source software. In the past, he developed high-performance model-driven software and worked on the design and implementation of modeling languages. He currently focuses on the design of libraries, concepts, and interfaces intended for AI to generate functional code.
