ZEISS DigiCon 2026 – Talk „AI Empowerment: Enable and Lead Your Team into the New Digital Era"
„AI has already moved from vision to reality. Now it's about how we lead today."
That's how Andreas Kalverkamp and I closed our joint talk at ZEISS DigiCon 2026, the internal digital conference that brought colleagues from across the group and the world together to think about how AI actually lands in daily work.
The title we chose: „AI Empowerment: Enable and Lead Your Team into the New Digital Era." Andreas as Head of People and Organizational Development, me from Responsible AI in Corporate Cybersecurity. The intersection where AI transformation actually happens: not in the tool, not in the model, but in what leaders do with them.
Three arguments carried the talk:
AI can be leveraged at different levels of depth and maturity — we don't have to start at the top, but we have to start. The maturity ladder runs from manual processes to administrative tasks to core process automation to augmented decision-making to AI-native organizations. Every team can find its next step. The mistake is waiting for a full transformation program before touching anything.
The full potential of AI only unfolds when leadership, the organization, and employees share responsibility. Culture and mindset sit at the center — but leadership strategy, organizational structure, and employee skills are the three vertices around it. Leaving any one of them out is why so many AI initiatives stall at 40% adoption.
AI adoption doesn't happen by chance. It happens when leaders role-model curiosity, encourage learning, and foster experimentation — even when outcomes are uncertain. If we wait for „our organization" to be ready for AI, we'll wait forever. Let's proactively enable our people to grow with AI instead.
One data point I keep returning to: research by Dell'Acqua et al. (2023) shows a clear split in quality of work between three groups — no GPT, GPT only, and GPT plus training. The training group outperforms both. AI exposure without training gives you variable results. AI exposure with training gives you high performance. That is a leadership decision, not an IT one.
Which of the three - leadership, organization, or employees - is currently the constraint on AI empowerment, acceptance and adoption in your team?