Winning in a data- and AI-first world will not depend on access to technology alone. For strong B2B companies, the real strategic advantage lies in something deeper: long-standing customer relationships, decades of domain expertise, thousands of highly trained and motivated employees, and millions of data points gathered through real operations.
Together, these assets create a powerful strategic control point!
Future needs heritage — or put differently: our heritage can become a competitive advantage.
This sounds simple, but making data available at the right quality, at the right time, in the right context remains one of the toughest challenges. This business opportunity has been an ambition and a journey for us at TKE and we are proud to have accelerated this journey with our partners #Databricks and #Microsoft.
Thank you Shiv Trisal, Dr. Daniel Holz, Florian GORZITZKE, and Aiman El Masri for inviting us to the #2026 Databricks Data + AI Summit. It was a pleasure to speak at the Manufacturing Executive Track hosted by you, Shiv.
I will never forget your impressive electric guitar entry!!
Reflecting on the event six weeks later, four memories and questions still stand out:
1. The energy of the participants was contagious.
2. Technology capabilities are evolving at record speed — how to keep up, how to distinguish hype from reality? [Impressive to see the announcements on Genie One, Genie Ontology, Unity Catalog Metrics, Lakehouse, …]
3. The business opportunities are broad and real — how to turn technology into value?
4. Governance of AI capabilities is more critical than ever?
One topic from the keynote particularly resonated with me: “Enterprise context is elusive.” Or put differently: If humans cannot read the data, how can AI read it?
For us at TKE, the summit confirmed our strategic ambition and direction to employ technology:
a) Digital, data and AI are a major opportunity for us and our customers
b) Future needs heritage: We tackle change head-on by building on our strong engineering heritage and augmenting it with digital, data, and AI capabilities.
c) Our technology and architecture principles are well aligned with our fundamental business principles: rigidity at the core — flexibility at the edge [thank you Ulrich Homann]. Our best athletes are our >400 branches
d) It is all about business value. We use technology at scale to enable business transformation — not the other way around.
These developments strongly support our approach to operationalizing AI beyond the hype:
1) Powerful AI technology – well governed
2) TKE’s deep and leading domain expertise
3) Business first: Broad deployment of technology with SMEs into core processes; For us: Service Operations
4) A foundation of high-quality, trusted, and secure data
I believe these four principles can lead to exponential value creation—led by humans and supported by data and AI.
Björn Brus, Christian Jung Ruben P. Fausto Richetti Blanco