How to become a speaker: 320 speakers at Bitkom TRANSFORM 2026

If you want to become a speaker, Bitkom TRANSFORM 2026 shows how many places a large conference awards: it closed on 19 March 2026 at Station Berlin after two days with more than 6,000 participants and 320 speakers on three stages, as Bitkom announced in a press release the same day. Arithmetically, a conference of this size has room for one speaker for roughly every 19 participants, and its programme reaches well beyond the opening by corporate CEOs. Alongside the stages there were workshops and masterclasses as well as the Digital Office Conference and the Work & Culture Conference running in parallel, which are formats where specialists can speak on a clearly defined topic. For your route to a first talk, this means tailoring a specialist topic to a format and submitting it to organisers before their programme is fixed.

Bitkom TRANSFORM 2026 in figures

In its press release of 19 March 2026, Bitkom reports more than 6,000 participants over two days, more than 200 hours of programme and 320 speakers on three stages. The headline of the release speaks of record attendance, although the text gives no figure for the previous year to compare it with. The event was opened by Bitkom president Ralf Wintergerst together with Bill Anderson, CEO of Bayer, Roland Busch, CEO of Siemens, and Bettina Orlopp, CEO of Commerzbank. Three members of the federal cabinet also spoke, namely Karsten Wildberger for digital affairs and state modernisation, Bärbel Bas for labour and social affairs, and Karin Prien for education, family, senior citizens, women and youth.

According to the release, the content centred on the practical use of digital technologies, above all artificial intelligence, and on digital transformation together with new business models. Security and resilience were added, as well as digital sovereignty. In the Innovators' Pitch, the organisers honoured SLAPStack from Dortmund and PiAS education from Leipzig. For context, Bitkom cites a study of its own according to which 93 per cent of companies see advantages in digitalisation and 5 per cent see disadvantages.

For TRANSFORM itself, the release names no application route for speakers. Information on the next edition, which Bitkom has announced for 17 and 18 March 2027, can be found at transform.show.

To become a speaker means winning one of 320 places

To become a speaker means to be taken onto a conference programme regularly by organisers as a specialist for talks, panels or workshops. TRANSFORM shows how many such places a single conference awards: 320 over two days. Divide the more than 6,000 participants by the 320 speakers and there is one person on stage for roughly every 19 participants. The release does not say whether the speakers are included in the participant figure, so the 19 should be read as an order of magnitude.

As speakers, the press release names the seven people from the opening and the cabinet. That is about 2 per cent of the 320, and the text is silent on the remaining 310 or so. Our interpretation: the large majority of places go to people who work well below the corporate top, specialists from companies and associations as well as from consultancies and startups who present a concrete topic from their practice. The release does not document this distribution, but it follows from the arithmetic, because seven people cannot possibly fill 200 hours of programme.

How you use this depends on where you start. If you are only beginning, our article How to become a conference speaker covers the whole route, and if you have no topic yet, start with What should I actually speak about.

Which formats at Bitkom TRANSFORM are open to specialists

The press release names keynotes and panels on the three stages, plus workshops and masterclasses, networking opportunities, and an expo and a startup area. The Digital Office Conference and the Work & Culture Conference ran in parallel. For specialists without a corporate title, the narrower formats are the obvious way in, because they call for a tight topic that can be worked out in an hour. The release does not say how organisers fill the individual formats; at many specialist conferences the selection runs through a call for papers, the public invitation to which professionals respond with a talk proposal.

Which preparation suits which format is our interpretation of the formats named in the release.

How long your talk should be if you want to become a speaker

The figures in the release also allow an average programme time per speaker to be worked out. 200 hours equal 12,000 minutes, and divided by 320 that gives about 37 minutes. Because panels and workshops occupy several speakers at once and the hours are not spread evenly, this is a simplification. It still works as a planning figure: a 30-minute talk with room for questions corresponds quite closely to what is available per person at a conference like this. How slot lengths are usually graded in the conference business is shown in How long is a conference talk.

How to become a speaker in four steps after TRANSFORM

The route to a place on a programme of this size can be divided into four steps that you can complete before the next edition in March 2027.

1. You settle on a topic that touches some of TRANSFORM's themes, such as AI in practical use, security or work organisation, and phrase it as a question your specialist audience has in daily work.
2. You choose a format in which you show your strength and build the talk to a length of 30 minutes.
3. You write an abstract that names the topic, the benefit and the audience in a few sentences, and have it read by someone who does not know your field. What an abstract has to achieve is explained in What is a conference abstract.
4. You submit to several conferences, because a single submission remains an application with an open outcome, and anyone who wants several talks a year plans several submissions from the start.

Our founder Marin Niehues has received more than 100 invitations on six continents and has spoken at more than 50 conferences in 30 countries, and Sessionize listed him as a Most Active Speaker in 2024 and 2025. An example with assumptions shows what such a rhythm means: suppose you submit one topic to twelve conferences a year, which is one submission a month, then you have twelve opportunities to convince a programme committee, and every response sharpens your abstract for the next round.