Welcome to Edition 10 of The CAIO.
Swiss telecom Sunrise cut 147 jobs this year and now says up to 450 more could go, citing AI and automation. A study of more than half a million developers found that AI tools raised the amount of code by 958 percent and the number of releases by 20 percent, and customers barely noticed. Both stories have the same gap in the middle. The tool arrived, and the process it was dropped into stayed the same. A layoff does not change that. Neither does a licence.
AI software now acts faster than a human can approve it. More and more companies and users are therefore asking: can AI be controlled at all?
A growing number of studies show that the question is a fair one. According to Gartner, more than 40 percent of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027, because of rising costs, unclear value or inadequate risk controls. In the same forecast, Gartner expects at least 15 percent of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously by AI agents by 2028. A global survey of executives by the Capgemini Research Institute points the same way: trust in fully autonomous agents fell from 43 to 27 percent within one year, while usage went up. The more experience companies gain with AI agents, the more clearly they see their limits and risks.
The heads of the big AI labs publicly warn against their own models and call for slowing down. Weeks later, one release follows the next anyway. In episode 10 of Prompt & Proper, Steffen Ochsenreither from Swiss Post and I ask what sits behind this fear campaign. Our answer: the risk lies less in superintelligent models than in agents we have given too many rights. The episode is in German, and this post captures the core of the conversation.
Welcome to Edition 9 of The CAIO.
From October every AI request at Zühlke is billed to the team that made it. Token prices more than halved this summer, and the bill is still the number to watch. A cheap model that fails twice and ends with a person on the case costs more than the expensive one. The same agent on the same prompt takes two routes and sends two bills. My own dark factory burned one billion tokens over several days for a game I would not pay for. Almost no company has a person whose job is to watch that bill and switch.
Welcome to Edition 8 of The CAIO.
One question ran under almost every post this month. When a model writes the code and anyone in the company can start it, what is left that a person has to own? The two posts that reached furthest answered it from opposite ends. One showed a company where people with no engineering title ship to production. The other showed an engineering organisation where execution got so cheap that deciding became the constraint. Put them together and the control you thought you had, knowing who wrote it, is gone.
Summary # At the 10th edition of the FRANKFURT FUTURE TALKS, a partner event by Wirtschaftsinitiative, F.A.Z. and Momentum held at Massif Central, Dr. Sarah Jourdan (Genow.ai), Romano Roth (Zühlke) and Prof. Dr. Peter Buxmann (TU Darmstadt) discussed Agentic AI. Moderated by Daniel Schleidt (F.A.Z.), the panel asked: Where does the hype begin, what is reality, and how is value created?
This interview was published on June 2, 2026 in IT-Markt, conducted by Coen Kaat. Translated from German.
Digital sovereignty is forcing IT leaders to rethink. With AI too, companies want to reduce their dependence on large foreign corporations. Romano Roth, Chief of Cybernetic Transformation at Zühlke, explains when a local AI infrastructure pays off and what to consider.
It is not the technology that is under pressure, but its integration into everyday business operations. Budgets are tightening, regulation is taking hold, and boards are demanding robust results rather than more roadmaps. The era of non-committal pilot projects is ending.
Welcome back to The Cybernetic CxO, a monthly newsletter for CTOs, CIOs, and digital transformation leaders navigating the AI era.
March was a breakout month. My reach nearly tripled compared to February. My post about the 750 billion dollar fear narrative became a high-performing post. And out of 32 posts this month, 6 of the top 7 were about the same topic: AI and jobs.
Summary # The NZZ article examines how tech giants like Meta, OpenAI, and Nvidia are now pouring billions into AI agents after already spending massive amounts on large language models. Meta acquired Moltbook (a “social network for AI bots”) and spent $2 billion on Manus. OpenAI acquired Openclaw for its autonomous AI agents. Critics see this as a “flight forward,” with companies investing even more money to solve the problem of poor returns on their LLM investments.
Welcome back to The Cybernetic CxO, a monthly newsletter for CTOs, CIOs, and digital transformation leaders navigating the AI era.
93/7: The Budget Split That’s Killing Your AI Program # This number hit a nerve. My post about the 93/7 split (93% of AI budgets going to technology, 7% to people and process) reached over 10,000 people and sparked a real debate.
2026 will be the year when the wheat is separated from the chaff in AI: it’s not the better model that makes the difference, but the ability to deliver impact under real-world conditions. What decision-makers need to know and do now so that AI evolves from experiment to true partner.
