What will the digital reality of Swiss companies look like in 2031? That question opened PROMODOS DIGITAL on 7 September 2026 in Baden, a dialogue forum run by the Hightech Zentrum Aargau. About 20 people from business, research, public administration and politics meet there two to three times a year. I am one of them. This whitepaper came out of the first round. It is written for boards and executive teams.
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.
What matters now is not to become dependent on particular AI models. For every use case, pick the model and the vendor best suited to it. The most capable solution is not always the one that makes the most sense economically and strategically. Only then can companies really secure cost control, transparency, technological interchangeability, long-term scalability and, in the end, their own sovereignty.
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.
Are you afraid of AI? Many people are, and the industry is happy to feed that fear. Fear gets attention, and attention raises money.
The talk takes the two big fears apart one at a time. Will AI kill us all? AI agents don’t turn evil. They play whatever role we give them. The real question is whether we hand the actor a real gun, and people make that decision. Will AI take our jobs? The data shows no mass unemployment, yet. It does hit the entry level, the jobs that are mostly tasks, and it raises the bar for human work from the average to the top. The bar has moved before, over years. This time it moves in months.
The price per token has been falling for months. The bill keeps rising anyway. In episode 9 of Prompt & Proper, Steffen Ochsenreither from Swiss Post and I compare what we see in our organisations, and it is the same pattern on both sides: the more we develop agentically, the faster consumption grows, and it grows faster than model prices drop. 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.
Summary # At Sunrise, one round of layoffs follows the next. Early this year the telecom group cut 147 positions, and now up to 450 more jobs could go. Sunrise is reviewing “a comprehensive realignment of its operating model” and wants to become more efficient with AI. Employees who spoke to NZZ am Sonntag suspect the cuts are meant to secure the executive bonus. Sunrise denies this.
For years the question was: “Can AI do that yet?” That is no longer the question. Agentic AI can now take over a surprising amount of work on its own. The bottleneck is no longer the machine.
A dark factory is a factory where you can switch the lights off, because nobody is standing on the floor anymore. In China, phones are already built that way. In episode 8 of Prompt & Proper, Steffen Ochsenreither from Swiss Post and I take that concept and put it on software development: goal in, finished software out, no human in between. The episode is in German, and this post captures the core of the conversation.
Summary # Companies have stopped asking whether employees can write a decent prompt. They want AI fluency, a confident and reflected way of working with AI. At UBS this has become career-relevant: according to research by NZZ am Sonntag, AI skills play a role in hiring, promotion and pay. Stefan Seiler, member of the group executive board and head of HR, puts it more carefully: “AI skills and practical experience are an important factor for future professional success.” The bank opens an “AI power hour” in every employee’s calendar each week and measures tool usage at an aggregated level.
