My name is Andrew Levine, I'm a partner with BCG and I'm optimistic about the future of AI. Because there's so much value we can unlock, we just have started a journey.The journey ahead of us will be inspiring, will be nerve -wracking, will be curious, will be stressful, dynamic. But it's such a great time to be in, so really looking forward to the future to come.The Optimist. Conversations with leaders and industries shaping Europe's future. Exploring the ideas and innovations driving progress across the continent.Welcome to The Optimist, brought to you by Tech by Handelsblatt. I'm Felix Seltner, I'm your host and I have the honor to take you all across Europe. For real talk with leaders about shaping this continent's future and today we take it up a notch.That's how much I can tell you. Our guest today came in and said, it's not easy to keep pace with the change that is happening in my industry. I have my radar on, it's on day and night.And even though I can barely keep up with everything that has just happened in the past. For weeks and you may guess what I'm talking about here, of course, it's the new internet,AI, everything that will stay with us over the next months and years is somewhat connected to that in the technology space.And our guest today has a really, really cool job title, Global Lead AI. How cool is that at BCG, also known as BOSS Consulting Group. He's also a managing director and partner there.And. He is really trying to explain to us and share with us how AI can be used in a beneficial way, how we can take advantage of it, how we can stay ahead of it and delegate to it instead of being afraid of it.And he really made me a journalist who's also kind of, you know, sometimes scared of AI. He really made me more optimistic about this whole thing.You may hear it in my voice. I'm, I'm excited now.And I hope you're. Here's Andre Levine.Welcome. Good to see you.Thanks for the invitation.You're the global lead for AI at BCG.What a job title. I think it's one of those new job titles that weren't around like 12 months ago. Can you share an example with everybody who's listening?What that actually means on a day to day basis?Absolutely. I'm pretty much focused on Europe these days. But AI, you can imagine, it's, it's been a topic for us for years, but the last two, three years, people start listening, there's a new energy in the market,AI for us, it's not about just redefining and building a new large language model or building AI models, it's really about how do I get this technique, this new intelligence to value for our clients, because there's, there's such a creative chaos out there in most of our clients in the middle stand.Yeah. It really knows how to cope with that, how to kind of get the hands on this trend in the technology, but more even how to make money with that.And, um, my day to day task is to get, um, all functions needed to make, um,AI being positively impacting results happening, meaning coordinating the technical community, orchestrating the, the people community, um, everybody who's needs to help to make this change happen. Um, pretty, this is my role to get people together and get this thing.Andrei, you said in the, in the very beginning, introducing yourself, you said it's nerve wracking.What, what, what are you doing? Do you have an example for that? Like you just talked about chaos out there.What, what's going on? Do you have an example that

just maybe happened to you? Just look the month of January.We just over Christmas, we shortly felt like we are getting, and we understood the new world. Like, like there was a saying in the valley, whatever happens, Microsoft will win. Um, Nvidia is kind of going straight.There's a 10, 10 years trajectory on.The chip provider, like somehow open AI was taking the market. Everybody got used to the new world.And then January, like, first of all, in the consumer electronics shows in first week of January, um, and media presented project digits, like a new supercomputer, 10, a thousand X, the power of a normal computer just for 3000 bucks, which is changing the whole economics and econometrics of the game.Then we had deep seek, just disrupting the performance level of open AI.And. So. Surprising everyone and kind of slashing the market.Then we had Stargate,Trump and a soft bank and open AI investing 500 billion in infrastructure.And then we just got used to deep seek and then. 2 .5 and Alibaba just outperform them again. Like it's a new speed. It's so crazy.What's happening out there.This is what I mean with nerve wrecking.You just try to make a strategy, try to advise where to go, try to make a plan.And then like, it might only be 24 hours later.You might re rethink what you're doing. But Andres.And.And I mean, this is a serious question. How can you sleep? Because these AI news, they come from all continents and I find myself having a hard time sleeping, not only because we have a newborn at home, it's just hard to tune out. How do you do that?When do you get up in the morning?When do you go to bed? Like, how do you even.AI these days is a bit, it's a bit like your newborn. Like it, it dictates very crazy schedules. It doesn't wait for my schedule. So, um, it is, it is a bit of a newborn element here because, um, it's unpredictable. It's not rational. In many cases, and you don't know what, like, um, even so news pop up to understand how much substance is behind that. Is it real performance?You need to investigate. Um, there's a lot of politics, geopolitics playing in here, um, market politics. So, um, I have, um, little sleep these days. But it's the greatest time to not have sleep, but like, you know, you know, newborn, you know, this is a thing which is going on. It's kind of, um, giving a lot of energy and, um, and, uh, curiosity. Curiosity at the moment to learn something new. So at the moment, the energy level is quite high. I hope it doesn't go that in that speed forever. So then need to be a bit of a rest. I guess you, you're hoping for the same, um, but generally it's a pretty cool time to be in.Andre, there is a really interesting thing going on at BCG as well, when it comes to using AI internally, because as you said, there's so much chaos out there and you have to be ahead of the curve because you're consulting, you're off service for so many organizations.And I read that you have built your.Your own internal AI lab where basic G employees can go and acquire a black belt.And I was just, when I read this, I was like thinking, wow, these, like all these karate kids and like bathrobes and, you know, belts and, and, and shouting, and what does that like mean to have a black belt in AI?And first of all, do you have one?Absolutely.And, um, the community is pretty big these days and shouting who are, it's now the shouting AI. Um, this is what they do.They go, um, there's some community.

Build up of people who are super enthusiastic about the art of the possible.And, um, you are right. Like we need to eat our own medicine.We need to be front runner in kind of briefing what we are doing here every day.And in BCG is pretty easy because you have like all those enthusiastic nerds and those kinds of cross city in so many talented people. So people are not resistant to change in BCG. I mean, still, it had a lot of effort to help them pull off credit, a creativity.Yeah.Yeah.Translate what this new technology can do to your daily business because everybody's stressed. Everybody's doing a lot.There's little patients also in BCG for a gimmick type of technology. So for us, the element was, how do I get it into a very, very serious discussion about how can it help you to make your day more efficient? Spend more time with your client waste less time on your modeling or on creating PowerPoints or on research, which is a rather standard task and spend more money in more time. Spend more time in translating it and spending time with your, with your clients. Interesting.You say that there's people are not resistant to change in my organization, something not a lot of leaders can say.And I guess in every organization, it would be someone saying, speak for yourself, Mr. Levine, what do you know, but there is this community growing, as you said, in your own around you of people that are enthusiastic, but I'm a journalist. So, you know, some people might argue, Hey, Felix, you might become, um, obsolete. Uh, soon, but I would love to know what your black Belters, your AI Samurais can do that. I, that I cannot like, what, what, what are they able to do these karate kids, uh, that I'm not able to. So they, they, they look into case team environments, into project situations.They are very much trained on the art of the possible of AI and Jenny eye, and they connect the dots. So they see processes in. Large transformation and large kind of research efforts in large kind of, um,AI kind of software development process projects, and they connect the dots.They see, look, there's a process going on, which we can do today with half the effort and they kind of educate our teams to kind of make them aware.This is where technology can help you.And once you are on the receiving end, the ones who see, whoa, I have saved half a day by applying technology.This is where you get excited.And this is where also.The training.The actual training starts because it's not just explaining generally people.What is AI can do to you, but you need to experience on your daily life and to see how much more productive and efficient you can become with AI. Um, this is what the blackboards are doing.They're inspiring people. So it sounds a little bit like it's a community of, of software summarize almost to like run around and test software and look into software all the time, have this huge radar.And every time there's a new blip on this vast landscape now of AI tools, they have to go.They have to try it out to have to learn it so they can recommend it to others. So there's a big human element here of interacting with software, educating about software, and just being aware of this toolbox growing, ever growing toolbox and what it is capable of. Is that, is that about, is that about right?And it easily could be fully fueled by hype and enthusiastic, but they also received the feedback, the honest feedback of what really does turn the needle, which is boring as a gimmick and what really kind of have differentiated in terms of performance. So they're both kind of giving input, but receiving feedback and this consulated knowledge is a

huge force for us to move fast in the market. But Andre, it brings me to a question that I'm also struggling with. I just had someone sent me recently a podcast about a WhatsApp group, uh, that we were both part of the podcast with, uh, was created by notebook LLM.And it sounded like a perfect podcast, two hosts.They were talking about, you know, the WhatsApp group and it was just a whole AI product that sounded very journalistic.And it kind of made me a little nervous about my job as a host and a journalist. Do you, how nervous are you about your own job? Do you think there will be a, a BCG in the future that's entirely run by AI?Yeah. So like, not sure how far in the future we can go. Like if we talk about ASI and artificial super intelligence, like the whole society would be newly shaped and our role as consultant would be certainly a very different one. But if I just predict like the next five to 10 years, which already given.The crazy month of January is a tough prediction. Um, I'm, I'm not absolutely not worried about BCG cause, um, bringing this technology to life, building the infrastructure, taking the whole word on this journey to become more productive and more efficient.There's a bright and cool future for BCG. Obviously, if you are in a very commodity type of consulting market where you kind of really kind of do research, which is available somewhere, and you just process the research and spill out slides.And this is.This is your product.You might be disrupted very soon, but if your mission, and this is what we see are like really kind of advancing the world of, of the most sophisticated clients and great competitive advantage. I don't think, um,AI, Jenny, I can replace what we are doing today, but it's sad, like 10, 20 years from now, um, the society might be very different one. Do you have an advice for media, uh, for people like me just asking for a friend? Of course.Yeah, no, like I would like. Look at the strength you're doing. I would probably would not kind of fight the technology cause your peers will use it.And the question is how can you become the most advanced journalistic peer by using AI? Uh, so I might feel like that people who are trying to, for the wrong reasons, trying to be super resistant against technology, they would just kind of been swiped away by those who will outperform them.And then it's most importantly, what matters to your audience, huh? Like if your audience like is. Consuming and certain part of journalistic input, very, very, as a, very much as a commodity and doesn't care about deep quality, very strong opinions and the human touch, um, remaining the human touch then might be not valued.And others elements on political debates where human touch and then very, very clear human opinion is highly valued.This is where I think journalism will go more and more, but just broadcasting facts. I think it become it anyways. Not your business anymore. Um, and it become even more commodity.And AI advanced super journalists. I kind of liked that. Um, I'll, I'll work on it.You in a machine, you can process much more facts.You can much more process information, um, than you ever could before. So like the human machine approach, I think it really is a superior model.Yeah.And there might be more Felix's out there in the future. I just had a friend, uh, on who invited read AI on stage for its first keynote speak. So this is the AI version,

the digital twin of Reid Hoffman. Uh, the founder of LinkedIn and a read was somewhere in the world and his AI was giving a keynote interview, um, at a summit in, uh, in California and people loved it, even though, of course, there's nothing new coming out of read AI. It's just based on all his podcasts, all his books, everything he has ever written, but it's a new experience, as I say, and it, it, it sort of charges what this audience is interested in and I find it fascinating to talk to you about this big picture, uh, of AI in an article.Yeah. I think the article published a few weeks ago, I think by BCG, uh, titled the geo politics of AI, uh, you guys, you and your team go into explaining super powers, like the us and China.Then you go to so called middle powers to which you count the EU.And when I was reading this, I thought. Okay.The EU is a middle power.That sounds a little sad. Is there like, what would have to happen for Europe. in this landscape that you are in every day to become a superpower, to become not a bunch of AI -charged people, to really become a force, a force for good, a force for what Europe stands for. Do you have a call to action or a roadmap for that? It's not only about AI.The general geopolitical landscape and the industrial power of Europe versus the US, versus China, and versus all the rising powers, India and co., is challenged all the way along the whole value chain of products, of engineering, of intellectual property.And AI is just another element where at the moment, if you very, very bluntly state the facts, if you would be an investor, and investors and capital, where capital goes, drives innovation these days, you would be having a hard time to explain why should I fuel money into the European market.You would see more talent, lower regulation, better taxing, less benefits, a more vibrant community to exist in the US and even partially in Asia. So at the moment, if you kind of just take this as a KPI, where would investors put their money on? Germany, Europe, France, at the moment, is not the hotspot where we collect monies. However, as mentioned, January is kind of a month where we have seen that things can change very, very fast.And we have now the AI Action Summit today organized by... by Emmanuel Macron, just happening today.There's good commitments for 100 billion plus investments to happen in Europe as well. So it's very dynamic. But we need to get our act together as Europe.And the biggest one here is regulation.Very clearly. Like if you create an environment where AI can experiment, wipe, still can remain in the ethical context of regulation, and you create a setup where you can foster, if you want to say, the innovation here, this is a certain source. Or education and the people talent. Like the amount of people and talent you need to kind of unlock what we are building up here is key.And then it comes to the communities. Like we have some rising communities in Europe, around Paris, around the Heidelberg Cluster, around Munich. Like the first hubs were now... Or Heilbronn, may I just throw in? Heilbronn, yeah. Heidelberg, Heilbronn, like the whole class, it's pretty cool.Where communities come together. Like you have corporates, you have academia, you have people coming together and kind of really building together for the future in an open source and collaborative environment. But this is very early stages.Again, sorry for the baby analogy, but very, very newborn style.While the rest of the world already have their, not teenagers, but at least their small growns.We need to catch up. But what I don't understand,André, is when you talk about regulation, do you vouch for

more? Or for less? Because of course the EU is very proud of its AI act.And in our first episode of The Optimist, we hosted Rolf Schumann, who's all about digital sovereignty and says, we are doing things here that are a little more difficult because we are doing them for ourselves, we're building for ourselves. But in the long run, they will be very, very important.And we are sort of building our own ecosystem.And the regulation is put on sort of the good side. But what is your...When you say regulation, what do you actually want? So first of all, I think a very clear framework for, as the EU AI act has done, to make people understand what is okay -ish in doing, and what is the red line and the gray line.Think this is table stakes. But the whole ecosystem of pulling off and Stargate type of effort, as you have seen, or an ecosystem around open AI, as you've seen in US, requires much more. It's a framework of making sure that, you know, it's making investments easy. It's a framework of building infrastructure around data and computing power and kind of computing centers easier, which is a question around how to manage the emissions around that, how to get the build permissions, the speed of getting this on the ground, both the investment and the execution side, the whole speed of regulation around, also the policies around education. Like so many curriculums in universities look 2025 exactly as they have looked 2020. Still, people are very much into building the old coding blocks in their education while the world has moved. Like what I mean with regulation and the policy is just get the framework together end -to -end to allow this country and this continent to prosper on the AI much faster and create competitive advantage and not make it more difficult.This is probably the whole package when we make it easier. So you're saying that there should be, you know, the regulation should be sort of the highway, the bridge for companies, for investments to flow through instead of preventing them.And you are also saying that the building has started and there needs to be more.And talking about education, which is so often a topic and with Rolf, our very first inaugural podcast guest, we talked about his 19 year old son who started a startup out of high school that Rolf even invested in himself.And he said, it's already happening. Do you have a positive example? Is there something that makes you optimistic when it comes to education and how people are educated in schools, in universities across Europe?Yeah, so obviously everybody's trying to find their path and obviously there's no best practice but we can look back in 10 years in history and look, this was a great decision on AI. Everybody's experimenting.And again, we might kind of think now, now you need to do prompt engineering as a key subject. Maybe in two years, we might be thinking very different.Yeah. So there's no proven recipe. I just urge everyone to be a bit more agile here. So just resisting on just doing the same as five years ago is not an answer. I understand it's very crazy and it's difficult to understand what's happening next, but ensuring this agility here is super important.And then also what gives me amazing confidence and optimism in what's happening is the new generation. they are not so much stubborn with the curriculums of the universities you see more and more very very interesting CVs and paths to acquire knowledge experience knowledge the hurdles to enter the market and become an expert are so low there's no one who can claim to be a Gen EI expert for more than three years some can which were very very deep in

in in in large language models but no one really is an expert so the burden to become an expert isn't that high so you can really shape still as in as in young entrepreneurs and young student what you want to learn and and this creativity gives a lot of hope. How about you yourself you said you have the coolest shops inside BCG and it's maybe hard to replace this 4am call with an AI maybe there will be an Android AI in the future that can take early morning calls but do you have a do you yourself have a favorite AI tool at the moment or is this something that really inspires you where you think this could actually take a few hours out of my week I think I'm gonna try using this more yeah so the the like the the most generic tools they are helping you only with generic tasks so where it gets really interesting where I can create specific solutions so BCG is I think the second worldwide largest users of open AI's custom GPTs now we have obviously equipped almost almost all of our customers with open AI and we have obviously equipped almost all of our customers the whole team with enterprise licenses and everybody's playing around with their own small GPTs and their small own apps. Here you can create your own workflows, your own small data racks, and you can really kind of create a very specific repetitive process.With the operator launch by OpenAI and the whole agentic system where you now also can create APIs and make executable kind of a type of software in a low -code environment, this is where everybody can build their own workflows.And this way it doesn't save you minutes, but you can kind of start to orchestrate stuff which you need to combine, like be it a report out of financial systems,A, to be pulled into a PowerPoint presentation, C, sent out to X,Y.You can start to automate small workflows which are super specific to your life.This is, I think, way advanced. It comes from no -code, low -code, I think is the talk of the town these days. Do you have a concrete example from your own day -to -day, like just one specific task that you automated this way?Yeah, so a lot of like newsletter. I was doing a lot of standard newsletters, no rocket science, no intellectual, probably just trying to, for me, the news I consider to be relevant to be sharing in a very short, summarized way. I was doing this my same, I was doing the selection. I was doing the writing, the formatting.Then I had a colleague of mine to help me out. But it is not intelligent. It just needs to be fast. It's commodity, but it needs to be at least sorted by something I consider to be priorities for my team. So with little input I give to the custom GPT I built, I built now those newsletters, and people like it.They have, by the way, less spelling errors, less copy -paste mistakes than I was doing, because I was obviously rushing through them.The quality has increased.The engagement score has increased. I feel super confident about the workflow. I'm still controlling it in a sense, but it saved me quite a bit of time. So just to understand, if you now come across an article, let's say about Deepseq, you feed it into the BCG, uh, version of ChatGPT, you have like a collection of other articles there.And then it creates little posts that give like an overview of what Andre read this week kind of an innovation report around AI.And what does that look like in your esc technique in pushes it out without you writing anything. It's just you feeding

the links, the sources.Absolutely.And it finds redundancy. I paste it twice, the same story, but from different perspectives, it combines things. Obviously, there's some good reasoning in this technology already today, so it sorts out. It certainly increases the quality. It helps to summarize it, but not just generic for unspecific audience, but the audience I cater to, my teams, they have very, very specific focus.And I obviously have trained them of my previous newsletters and what matters to us, what is our business model. So with a bit of effort, a one -time effort, you create a pretty cool workflow.This is me. I would like, what I am at the moment looking in is the more tax -heavy processes, the more knowledge management type of process you have, the more value you can create.And think of knowledge management. Knowledge management sounds like a pretty boring library type of file -sharing type of exercise. But if you think of a BMW or a big IG conglomerate like BASF, all of those big companies, they have so many roles where knowledge management is key.What do I mean with that?There's a job where someone is facing an unlimited amount of information of historic protocols, handbooks, manuals, policies, and then there is an output he needs to create, like maybe running a factory or running a machine and increasing the uptime of the machine at any point in the day.And then something happens to the machine and an error code pops up.You need to find out, open a handbook and say what does error code F5006 mean?And then you find maybe if you're rightly searching for the right keyword, you might find this problem, but then the answer, you can't understand it. It's very complicated, maybe in a different language, and even in your language, it might be so technical you can't understand it. So you can't talk to this information.And so both paths of this equation, finding information faster but not knowing exactly the keyword, but then being able to interact with this information, there are so many roles in industrial Europe which are exactly in this stage.And the output of that is not just a cooler job, it's physical and measurable operational KPIs. Like we have seen that manufacturing sites can be, by using GenAI for knowledge management, can increase their uptime by 20 to 30 percent just by being faster in accessing knowledge and being able to process it.And execute on it. So it's huge money. My process of writing and using it is boring. It's not real money. But this type of things can really advance our industry.And there is, I think, two sides to when you think about a large organization and the use of AI as we are today, as you said, it's sort of like the narrow AI, right, that we are with at the moment, which I find so fascinating because it's already so overwhelming. But there seems to be, two sides often.You said the leaders, the CEOs, many of which are, of course, listening to this format.There is now pressure.There is pressure to save money.And this creates fear on the employee side of just rationalization and AI basically just being used as a way to cut jobs, to save money by reducing head count. So when you think about the employee side of things, what do you tell people who might listen right now and think, I'm doing all this work that Andrey is talking about every day. I'm the Excel cruncher. I'm the PowerPoint creator. I'm the knowledge manager.What do I have to be optimistic about when it comes to AI? Do you have an injection for everybody who is listening right now and is on the employee side and is kind of a little fearful? I guess there's good reasons for the fearfulness because it's so unpredictable. It's so

unpredictable it will happen outside the world and nobody knows how the world is going and I guess in the industrial revolution 100 years ago, people also were fearing.And this would be naive for me to say there will not be a change of skill sets of the workforce needed for the next 20 years to go. But this was always the case. Even 20 years ago around the digital, skill sets are changing and will change and our workforces have lived through this evolution all over again and again. So I can't say there is no change going to happen. However, if I look at the current state, I would just kind of try not to fight it. It will happen.There is no way. It might not be happening in Germany because others will be faster. It might happen in Germany but I would find whatever job I do, I would find the AI version of my job. How can I kind of become a more efficient employee?And this is the mindset everybody should be about. Not worrying about being replaced but worrying about how can I become and use the machine to get twice as productive as I am. Because also very clear, a lot of our companies are under huge structural disadvantage at the moment. Jobs in Europe are more expensive than they are in Asia and Eastern Europe.And if you now kind of just ignore this situation, we will just run into closing factories and then we just downsize what we are doing. I think the more fruitful path is to kind of acknowledge technology, get more cost competitive, but then also kind of get more productive in the workforce. So I would just ask everyone not to get frustrated, but take this energy, get the curiosity and kind of redefine your skill set.There will be change happening. So maybe a good first step would be, if I'm listening to this and I'm thinking, wow I want to do this, is maybe just list your task, list your, like unravel your own role a little bit and see what there are in repetitive knowledge management tasks that you do every week and then go out and look on the, you know, maybe at BCG and all the tools that you list or other radars that are out there that list these huge toolboxes and just see what you can bring into that. Is that maybe a good first step? I think this is a very good radar.Text heavy processes and everywhere where knowledge is processed a lot, regulation, technical knowledge, those are the points to look into.This is where it becomes the ugliest forest. It will make your job a cooler place anyway.You get more productive, you become a leader of the future. So I would exactly start with those things to start with.At one point, Felix, you mentioned this. It's not that easy for people to capture what's happening out there. For me at BCG and leaving BCG AXI in central Europe, it's super easy because I have these ecosystems, I daily talk.You get paid for it. I get paid for that.This is my job. Like I know what's happening out there and people ask us. But for many people it's the things that are going so fast, so tough to catch up. So one of the big levers, especially for more senior leaders, I advise them to also rethink the communities they're in. How do I get engaged into community setups where I get those information from people who are experienced and tested that. If I stay with the same people and talk to the same people all day long, you might not get those news.You might not get those new experiences or those learning curves. So I would challenge every leader, how do I get into an ecosystem of innovation? Much more important than it was maybe five or ten years ago.You're almost passing me the ball and I just have to head it in because we're coming to the end of the podcast and of course I wanted to talk about the tech conference by

Handelsblatt premiering in Heilbronn.As Rolf Schumann, our inaugural guest said, sexy Heilbronn in May. Gathering European leaders for the first time in this new setting to build a quote unquote cluster of optimism, which I find such a big beautiful tagline. Of course, the podcast is adjacent to this and you're a co -initiator of this gathering with BCG, co -creating this new community of European leaders. Leaders that are building moonshot startups, that are investing in deep tech, that are leading digital transformation, digital sovereignty, cybersecurity, digital initiatives in large corporations as we just talked about. So you just mentioned leaders should look for new communities to keep up with the pace of change and everybody who is interested in building in the next couple of years needs to rethink what they're a part of.What is your wish, what is your hope for this new community that is emerging through the tech conference?A lot of companies haven't seen money over the last two years because we have celebrated tech.And tech was celebrated by the tech community and was a cool party out there. But tech itself doesn't lead to money. It's those leaders who then change the process, restructure the organization and kind of set up organizations in a different way on base of the tech.Those are the ones who make money. So my biggest wish is that those AI communities we are building are not AI communities first of all they are value communities I hope but secondly that they are getting a much more mixture of leaders, business owners, business process leaders, hats of marketing, hats of procurement, CFOs, CFOs meeting the art of the possible of the tech community and they both together find journeys to make money with this trend.And I come back to the very first point.We need to attract investment money into Europe.And investment money requires return. It doesn't play only on the promise of a cool technology. So we need to get a bit more serious about proving that we are the country who gets the theory of AI into scalable infrastructure into real money processes.This is I think where I hope this community gets a bit more realistic and a bit less playful as it was maybe in 23, 24. How do we get this path to value creation? I have to say I'm so honored that you took the time here and you're sharing so many valuable insights with us.Thank you André for being a guest on The Optimist.A final question I want to ask you and we're still tinkering on the podcast like what is a good way to end because we would like to end on something valuable and interesting for everybody who's listening. So I might just press you and ask is there maybe a little signal like an article or a book or a newsletter.We talked about newsletters today. Our podcast no pun intended or other sources in regards to AI that you would recommend today because they inspire you or they fuel your own optimism. So I hate to say that obviously there's tons of cool news out there and a ton of cool podcasts etc. It sounds like you're pitching a BCG newsletter right now. No, I wouldn't do that.They're all great but obviously we also just kind of replicate what's also there and should just put on top our experience. But I would love people to think of their human networks. It sounds crazy but think of your local communities.Think of your tech partners you have surrounding you and get closer to them. For many of our leaders they are still theoretical partners or suppliers even.They are the new thought leaders of the future. So do you know who is providing your cloud services? Do you know what is happening in their pipeline?This is stuff you will not find on paper or you will be pretty late if you find it on paper. So how do I get a bit earlier than the news into a

sensing of what's happening out there people are thinking about. So I think strengthening the people community around AI experts, I think this is super valuable for leaders to do. So basically think of a farm to table approach when it comes to AI. Start thinking about where the tools that you're using are coming from. Connect with other humans around these and try to get more understanding and transparency into your own ecosystem. Is that what you're recommending?What you can read is what's in the market. But given the crazy month of January you need to get a bit more sensing of what's coming in March.And the coming March is tough to read out of the news. It's tough to read out on Britain. It is a lot in the heads and the pipelines of the people. So if you want to play the new speed you need to get closer to the community.And who knows what's going to happen in May when we see each other,André, in Heilbronn for the tech conference.Thank you so very much for taking the time to be our second guest on The Optimist,André Levin.And yeah, see you in Heilbronn.Thanks so much.Thanks for the invitation.Thanks for the great podcast.Thank you. Bye bye.Thanks for listening to The Optimist. For more insights and updates about tech, visit us at tech -europe .orgThe Optimist is produced by Tech by Handelsblatt. Music by Christian Heinemann. Stay curious.