Data Culture Podcast

Creating business value with AI takes more than choosing the latest technology. Olya Nikolaeva, cluster leader for data, AI and automation at Swiss Post, explains how her teams connect platform development with business projects and challenge technology-first requests. The conversation explores how AI changes engineering skills, why organizational boundaries need rethinking, and what continuous le...

„Wir brauchen schnellere Entscheidungen durch KI, nicht noch mehr Reports. Das genau erzeugt Vibecoding aber oft: Hunderte und Hunderte von HTML-Reports, die keiner mehr überblicken kann.“ - Christoph Hein

„Wir investieren enorm viel in die digitale Transformation. Doch nur ein ganz kleiner Bruchteil davon landet messbar im EBIT. Tech is easy, Change is not.“ - Nina Indina

“The better you describe your data products, the better the answers from AI agents will be.” - Simon Harrer

„Datenqualität ist nie so, wie ich sie mir wünsche. Die Frage ist: Für welchen Use Case brauche ich welche Daten – und sind sie dafür gut genug?“ - Dirk Böckmann

“It’s the data. Until you solve the data riddle, you’re not going to be as successful with AI as you would want to be.” - Kelley Lynn Kassa

„Ein schönes Bild mit GenAI hinzubekommen ist relativ leicht – die letzten 20 Prozent zur Produktkorrektheit sind die Herausforderung.“ — Sascha Netuschil

„Wenn ich die Forecast-Erstellung von drei Monate auf wenige Tage reduziere, habe ich einen enormen Entscheidungs- und Wettbewerbsvorteil.“ – Björn Stauss

“If you're not already thinking about how to govern the agent environment that you're building, we believe that it is not a nice to have, it's a must have.” - Shawn Rogers

“Transparency may start as a side effect, but it can become the key to building trust and driving adoption” — Christian Petri

"Sovereignty is not only about cloud, not only about data, and not only about models. It touches the entire stack."

„I think unstructured data is ultimately where a company's intelligence is.”

„Souveränität heißt nicht, dass all deine Daten und all deine Technologien on-Premise leben müssen."

“The semantic layer is the best way to embrace data silos — to embrace chaos: There will be chaos behind this wall, but this wall is very nice and clean for me."

„Nach 200 spannenden Gesprächen mit Data Leadern sehen wir ganz klar: Das Thema Datenkultur ist heute wichtiger denn je.“

“Die Zunahme von Hybrid-Cloud- und On-Premises-Strategien ist kein Rückschritt – es ist intelligentes Datenmanagement.“

“The problem is not the technology. The technology is here. It’s more the change management of the users.”

“Everybody wants to have the numbers from other areas, but nobody really wants to share their own numbers.”

"Right now, AI seems like the wild, wild West – and I would recommend to show a little conservative decision making before you run off and do wild things with AI."

"The real challenge is not to use always the newest model, but to be able to put it into production and get results out of it."

"Sometimes I understand that we should find time for playing with data and building something not to solve a problem or achieve KPI, but just for fun."

“The pinnacle is the trust that you build with the stakeholders and the data consumers. And you can lose it very easily.”

“If you can prove value with a live prototype, selling the business case becomes much easier.”

“For us, a data marketplace was like a key turning point because it gives transparency what data assets are already there.”