The route from newsroom to AI transformation — through journalism, agencies, and AI — told through the work rather than the job titles.
The AI era · 2024 – present
AI strategy & hands-on delivery — AOK Medien
Designing and running the AI transformation of the in-house agency of Germany’s largest health insurer — in a regulated, high-trust healthcare context.
- Guidelines. Authored the agency’s AI compass: the how and why of using AI, from human-in-the-loop and responsible use to transparency rules such as disclosing AI use in image generation.
- Team. Built a dedicated AI team — an AI specialist and an AI video expert — and coordinate a network of “AI buddies” embedded across the business units.
- Workshops. Designed and delivered 30–40 workshops for colleagues and clients — from AI introductions and prompting fundamentals to a series of masterclasses.
- Pilots. Prioritised and ran pilot projects that test AI in real editorial and production workflows before anything scales.
Building AI-native products
Not slideware — products in use.
- Video avatars. AI-generated explainer videos and a weekly “news of the week” format for internal communication.
- Dashboards. Built with Claude — KPI dashboards for the team, plus a personal system for organising my own work.
- Digitised internal processes. An event booking platform and a customer-service ticketing system, replacing manual back-and-forth with something that runs itself.
Writing on tech & AI regulation
- The World’s a Little Blurry: Technology in the AI Era (2025). A personal book on how we should regulate technology in the age of AI — the policy questions we keep dodging while the tools race ahead.
- Disfluency — ongoing LinkedIn newsletter on marketing, content, and innovation.
The agency era · 2012 – 2023
Two decades leading strategy, content, and production for demanding clients.
- EU & UEFA — TV commercial reaching ~500M viewers across a Champions League season (Scholz & Friends, 2021).
- Samsung — led pitch and production of a €500k B2B animation for security products (shanghai.berlin, 2022).
- Mercedes-Benz — three international video shoots, long-form YouTube films (Looping Studios, 2018).
- Netflix — client lead, DACH social media (TLGG, 2013–2015).
- Neue Signale — co-founder; strategy workshops that returned clients to profitability (2016–2018).
The journalism era · 1998 – 2012
Where the content instinct came from.
- de Volkskrant — online editor-in-chief; digital strategy delivering 20% year-on-year visitor growth (2007–2010).
- Pixels en Komma’s — drove online-first transformation at a regional broadcaster, doubling visitor numbers (2010–2012).
- Academy for Journalism — lecturer, preparing students for cross-media journalism.
- BN/DeStem — long-form weekend-magazine reporter and football reporter (1998–2007).
Fuller detail on the earlier work — with expandable case studies — lives on my CV.