Last week at the One Finance Meeting 2025, it was a pleasure to share how Deutsche Telekom is turning vision into action with AI across products, services, and enablement. Because as I see it, the future isn’t a far-away thing anymore but something that’s already here and being rolled out at scale at multiple companies as we speak.
A big shout-out to Dr. Robert Hauber for trusting me for a second time to speak about AI to your colleagues from finance. Even if I kept the title of my presentation the same for most of the time, its content has shifted dramatically since its inception. Under the theme “The Future is now: (Gen)AI today…and tomorrow,” I took my colleagues on a journey exploring how markets are shifting fast as multi‑model AI strategies are becoming the norm. We can see enterprise adoption clearly accelerating across functions like finance and legal. As AI capabilities and market shares are moving rapidly, one thing becomes also clearly obvious: nothing is static, change is the only constant.
I highlighted some real-world examples for AI adoption here at Deutsche Telekom:
- Award‑winning assistants in service
- The ASK MAGENTA customer concierge across multiple touchpoints
- askT as our internal “answer machine” to upskill teams and speed up work
- A conversation training pilot
- Multi‑agent systems for planning and execution
All of this again brings us to yet another learning: Human‑centric interfaces and network operations “with and for AI” are becoming everyday practice.
I didn’t want to pass on mentioning our AI Phone and Magenta AI, which will bring a seamless, multimodal assistant experience powered by top AI partners directly to our customers. These innovations simplify tasks without constant app‑switching and make advanced AI accessible to all by design. It’s a concrete step toward democratizing AI in daily life for all of us.
Then we looked ahead: from agentic AI like Manus and MCP‑enabled tool ecosystems to AI‑generated content, virtual influencers, synthetic data for model training, and eventually „embodied AI“ – Robotics, AI put into a metal skull, because, well, I think that’s where we’re headed. Along with all these rapid changes, open questions on education, work, and how society will navigate the era of synthetic media popped up. The goal has to be: responsible, human‑centered progress.
Last but not least, I talked about the AI-Pioneers program. The program has been scaling quite constantly across the company to infuse AI competence into every team, with hands‑on learning, Promptathons, and collaboration across Sales & Service and beyond. Adoption is ultimately about people, not just technology.
Thank you Tim Höttges, Christian Illek, and Wolfgang Nickl for your inspiring on-stage insights, the amazing host Stefanie Becker, and Finn Baldes, Paulina Mück and team for your amazing event preparation.