Piazza Colonna is a short walk from Montecitorio, where Italy's Chamber of Deputies debates and votes the country's laws. On the afternoon of October 28, inside Palazzo Wedekind on that same square, Exelab and its founder and CEO, Emanuele Caronia, received the award in the Innovation category at the CEOforLIFE Awards 2026.
The setting suited the idea behind Polyant, as a statemtn about rules as much as technology.
The award recognizes Polyant, the platform Exelab built to bring AI agents into business processes as working digital collaborators. It was presented during the afternoon session of the Meeting di Montecitorio Awards 2026, devoted to Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, Digital Transformation, Research and Innovation. The awards round table on the programme, Project proposals from the business world, brought together leaders from companies including DXC Technology, InfoCert, Workday, Kaspersky and Mitel.
CEOforLIFE and Task Force Italia were founded by Giordano Fatali to bring businesses, institutions, universities and younger generations around shared projects. The 2026 edition ran over two days, October 27 and 28, under the patronage of INPS. Andrea Carbone (general manager), Andrea Benso (CFO), Fabrizio Regini (CTO) and Paolo Valletta (Polyant's lead developer) were in the room with Caronia.
Many companies have added AI to the processes they already had, and many of them are still waiting for the results they were promised. The usual explanation points at the models: not accurate enough, not mature enough, not ready for real work.
Caronia has been making a different case for some time: AI slotted into existing workflows rarely delivers, and change comes when structure, governance and processes are redesigned around it. That includes how models and agents are governed once they are running. The work reaches well beyond the IT department: it asks companies to be more integrated, more at ease with their own data, and more willing to change how they work.
On stage, Caronia described what Exelab kept running into while building its AI solutions: "In developing these solutions, we kept running into the same needs from companies: regulation, GDPR, sharing data with language models. They needed more control over their data and their infrastructure."
None of the items on that list concerns how well a model writes or reasons. Each one concerns what happens around it: which data an agent can see, where it runs, and who answers for what it decides. Until a company can answer those questions, an AI project tends to stay a pilot, however good the model behind it. In practice, the bottleneck is governance, and it sits in the organization rather than in the software.
Polyant was built around those questions. It is an open-source platform for building and governing teams of AI agents, and it gives each agent a defined role inside a company's real systems, with controls built in and a log of its actions.
Translation: an agent stops being a chat window running alongside the work and becomes closer to a colleague, with a clear remit, limits on what it can touch, and a record that someone can check afterwards. That record is something a data protection officer or an auditor may ask to see.
The award Caronia collected on October 28th recognizes Exelab's work on Polyant, a platform whose central idea is control over data, infrastructure and decisions.
It was handed out on a square where institutions and businesses sit at the same table, which is increasingly where questions about data and AI get decided. As Exelab CTO Fabrizio Regini put it that afternoon, "The real strength of the solution comes from the fact that companies can deploy it inside their own environment, within their own IT. That gives them full control over the process of developing an AI-based solution."
More about Polyant at polyant.ai.