For us, the summer festival hosted by the Unternehmensverband Kiel e.V. also served as a very successful example of best practice for The Bay Area’s mission to bring new ideas from an international perspective to Schleswig-Holstein.

UV Kiel Managing Director Ingo Scheuse took advantage of the new contacts made during the delegation’s most recent trip and invited Sabine Remdisch to deliver a keynote address at the association’s summer festival. As a professor at Leuphana University and a visiting scholar at Stanford University, she made it clear to Kiel’s business community that:

AI transformation is not a matter of technology. It is a matter of people and is transforming leadership.

Remdisch's research clearly shows what employees expect from their employers. At the same time, it reveals a wide range of opinions regarding trust in AI and in one's own abilities.

Companies must now establish the framework for using AI—both technically and, above all, organizationally. Remdisch compared this to onboarding a new employee into an existing team: What should working with AI look like within their own companies in the future, where should AI provide support, and how can AI workflows be established across different departments?

Much of this involves classic organizational development tasks: ensuring that employees who want to get started with AI don’t lose motivation; dispelling others’ skepticism; and providing the right training to ensure that no one in the company is left behind.

We're already looking forward to the next event with guests from San Francisco:
Carsten Schultz and the KiRi Institute at Kiel University (CAU) have a close partnership with San Francisco State University in the field of Responsible Innovation & Entrepreneurship—and are bringing their joint conference to Kiel for the first time on July 2 and 3.