Most innovation does not die at the patent office. It dies long before that, in the way an organization makes decisions, executes, and turns ideas into outcomes.
I was invited onto The Hard Things About IP, hosted by Dimitris Giannoccaro and produced by IamIP, for Episode 7. We stepped beyond patents and legal frameworks to the question that sits before every filing: how do organizations actually turn ideas into real results? We talked about AI transformation, organizational design, why so many AI initiatives get stuck in pilot mode, how feedback loops drive decision-making, and why accountability needs to live where the work happens.
I joined Lisa Stähli on the Hello 50:50 World podcast, the show with the mission to make tech more humane, for a conversation about what actually happens when software teams add AI to the way they work. We talked about how AI is reshaping software engineering, DevOps and agile ways of working, where the real bottlenecks sit, the human cost of moving faster, and why the organisation you build around the technology is what decides whether AI helps or hurts.
I joined the adorsys Tapas & Pretzels podcast for a conversation with co-hosts Tim and David, fellow Chief AI Officer, about the question every leader is now asking: how do you move AI from isolated experiments to a company-wide capability? We talked about token economics, what the Chief AI Officer role actually demands, why capability beats tools, the trust gap that governance exists to close, and why most companies are speeding up broken processes instead of rethinking them.
AI portfolios rarely fail because leaders lack ideas. They fail because too many initiatives are funded before anyone proves they can move a business metric, fit into a real workflow, or survive enterprise constraints.
I joined Emily Erker on her show Lady Sunshine Live for a German-language conversation about building future-ready organisations through what I call a cybernetic enterprise: the integration of people, processes, technology, and AI in continuous feedback loops. The full video is embedded below; what follows is my English summary of the key ideas we covered.
Header photo: Romano Roth (left) and Raphael Reischuk. Source: Zühlke (zVg), via inside-it.ch.
Effective 1 May 2026, the Zühlke Group has introduced two new roles at group level: a Group Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and a Group Chief AI Officer (CAIO). I have taken on the Group CAIO role; my long-time colleague Raphael Reischuk has been appointed Group CTO. Both of us were already partners in the group.
Banks spend 93% of their AI budget on technology. Only 7% goes to people. And then they wonder why 95% see no impact on their P&L.
On March 31, 2026, I gave a keynote at the Zühlke Banking Talk in Schlieren on why the future of AI is “cybernetic” and what it takes to become an AI-native bank. The evening brought together perspectives from academia, a major German bank, and practitioners from Swiss financial institutions.
I am honored to share that I have been named a Digital Shaper 2026 in the Mentors category. The Digital Shapers initiative, organized by BILANZ, Handelszeitung, and digitalswitzerland with the support of Huawei, recognizes 100 of Switzerland’s most influential digital minds each year across ten categories.
Although AI has moved fast, many organisations haven’t. Most leaders we speak to aren’t short on ideas, proofs of concept, or vendor demos. The challenge is turning AI into something repeatable, a capability you can trust, scale, and steer without creating new risks or bottlenecks.
Understand why most digital transformations fail, and you’ll figure out what tomorrow’s leading businesses will all have in common. Here’s how Cybernetics solves AI challenges at scale.
Discover the people, processes and technology you’ll need to mitigate setbacks on your transformation journey, and unlock AI-augmented ROI that compounds as it scales.
Most companies that work in an agile way today while simultaneously trying to implement AI will not survive the next decade, in my opinion. The reason: their operating system is too old. The future is not agile. The future is not AI either. The future is cybernetic.