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.
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.
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.
The CEOs of the big AI companies never tire of claiming that AI will wipe out up to 40 percent of all jobs. The headline works. School leavers ask Steffen whether a tech degree is still worth starting, and a German university has gone as far as advising against studying computer science.
When people talk about AI and jobs, they almost always mean developers. The larger part of the working world sits elsewhere, in offices, in HR, in marketing, in administration.
In episode 3 of Prompt & Proper, Steffen Ochsenreither from Swiss Post and I look exactly there. And we quickly land on a point that has nothing to do with technology. The episode is in German, and this post captures the core of the conversation.
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?
Welcome to the first issue of The CAIO. The newsletter you knew as The Cybernetic CxO has a new name, and the reason is on the cover of this issue. From 1 May, I am Group Chief AI Officer at Zühlke. The job is the same work I have been doing for years: getting AI past the pilot phase through transformation across organisation, process, and technology, not by tuning the model alone. The newsletter title now says that out loud.
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.
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.
I recently joined the Digital Analog Podcast to talk about what it really means when humans and machines work together. As the Chief of Cybernetic Transformation and Partner at Zühlke, I deal with these questions every day. In this conversation, we covered everything from the biggest obstacles in digital transformation to why AI agents could change the way we collaborate, and why simplicity should be every organization’s guiding principle.
“AI won’t fix your broken processes. DevOps won’t save your business. But Cybernetics might.”
At DevOps Pro Europe 2025 in Vilnius, I had the privilege of delivering the opening keynote to a packed hall of engineers, architects, and leaders navigating the ever-accelerating evolution of enterprise technology. My message was direct:
