How is a keynote booked, and how fast do you answer?

Through Athenas, who manage my calendar and fees: kontakt@athenas.de, or the form on the booking page. They answer inside the working day and scope the brief with me directly once the basics are settled.

Will you pitch your company from the stage?

No. There is no Aiomics slide, no product demo and no sales follow-up. I disclose the company as an interest at the start — it is the reason the examples are current — and that is where it ends. This matters for pharma compliance teams, so it is written down rather than left to be asked.

What languages, and are they equivalent?

German, English and French. All formats run in all three. German and English are equally strong; French works well for keynotes and prepared sessions, and for a workshop with heavy open discussion I would suggest German or English if the room can carry it.

What do you need from us technically?

A lapel or headset microphone, HDMI or USB-C to the stage system, 16:9 at 1920×1080, and my own laptop on stage. Confidence monitor appreciated, not required. I bring a clicker and adapters. For broadcast, a wired connection and a rehearsal slot the day before.

For insurance, banking, energy, industry and the public sector

Move fast and break things is not available to you.

Every reference case in the AI conversation comes from an industry that can ship a bad answer and apologise later. Yours cannot. I work in the one place with a stricter standard than yours, and the method travels.

Enquire about a date →

The pattern across regulated sectors

Governance built as a gate, not a lane

When the only answer legal can give is no, the work moves into private accounts and unapproved tools. The exposure goes up, not down, and now it is invisible.

Pilots that cannot cross the line into production

Everything works in the sandbox. What kills it is audit trails, retention rules, explainability to a supervisor, and who signs. Those are design constraints, not paperwork.

The wrong people being trained

Analysts get tool training. The people whose judgement is now the bottleneck — team leads, reviewers, underwriters, engineers who sign off — get a webinar.

Talks for this audience

When being wrong is expensive.

AI in industries that cannot move fast and break things.

EN · DE · FR

Built for regulated sectors: how to design an AI capability that a supervisor, an auditor or a court can inspect afterwards — without governance so heavy that the work goes underground. Uses GDPR and the EU AI Act as concrete cases rather than a compliance lecture.

What the room leaves with

Governance as a lane instead of a gate, with the design rules that make it one
The four production constraints that kill sandbox projects, known up front
How to tell a real regulatory blocker from an inherited assumption

Leading with AI: delegate less, stay closer to the work.

What changes for senior people when the cost of doing it yourself collapses.

EN · DE · FR

Senior professionals were taught to hire well and get out of the way. AI lets a leader drop two levels of abstraction back into the work without paying the time cost that made that impossible. What that does to how a team is run, and where it goes wrong.

What the room leaves with

Which decisions to pull back and which to keep delegated
How to use AI on your own thinking — the reflective use almost nobody tries
Why staying close is not micromanagement, and how to tell the difference

Rewriting the rules of the game.

Why the better answer is rarely a better version of the old one.

EN · DE · FR

The Fosbury Flop was not a better high jump; it was a different jump. When conditions change this fast, the advantage sits with organisations that redesign how the work is done rather than doing the old thing harder. An argument for that kind of noticing, and the practice that makes it possible.

What the room leaves with

How to spot where your industry is still doing the old jump
The difference between an efficiency gain and a redesign, and why only one compounds
A method for finding the redesign before a competitor does

Sven really brings fresh solutions to old problems. You can see he is pushing AI to its edges for very pragmatic problem-solving.

Fund managerPrivate equity

Spoken for

Written on this

Founder Mode Has a New Floor

The advice founders are given — hire great people, get out of the way — is the advice that nearly broke Airbnb. What changes when AI removes the excuse for not staying close to the work.

Read the essay →

Next step

Leadership offsites, risk committees, annual conferences.

If your compliance function has ever been called the department of no, this is the talk to put in front of both sides of that argument at once.

Enquire about a date → See workshops →