AI POCKET GUIDE

The vast majority of companies in a country are small and medium size companies. The EU defines SMEs as companies with up to 250 employees and 50 millions annual revenue. According to the European Union 99% of the companies in the EU are SMEs. It is one thing, if VW or Google try to use AI, but what about SMEs? SMEs have barely research money or money "to waste", every wrong decision can literally break the company. They have up to no resources to spare and very seldom the money or the time to heavily invest in IT or new personell. So how do you consult in this environment? How does it differ to be an SME consultant in comparison to an AI consultant for big companies? Nicole Weider, Isao Kabayashi and Satya Dharnapuram discuss with Ansgar Bittermann this special job assignment.

In our newest podcast recording, Nicole Weidner, Associate Partner at Xenium is going to give an impulse talk about the topic "Why arent't you getting more from your Marketing AI?" Nicole has been a managing consultant at Xenium for over 10 years and since January 2021 she is an Associate Partner at Xenium. She has a deep knowledge in project management and IT consulting. Her talk will be loosely based on the recent Harvard Business Review Spotlight Series "AI-powered Marketing". For interested parties who want to prepare, here is the link to the article: https://hbr.org/2021/07/why-you-arent-getting-more-from-your-marketing-ai

We want to start the new panel discussion cycle with an open panel to give our experts more room and space to exchange their ideas and experience on the last 20 years of digital transformation. What phases did our experts encounter over the past 20 years. Which were the trigger points, the drivers, the pace makers. Which phases went successful, where could we have won more or even missed opportunities?

Employees are the backbone of each successful company. But the common hiring process produces 85% disengaged and wrongly hired employees. This results in a high quitting and firing rate or low performances and frustration in the job (for both employer and employee).
Thus the common hiring process is flawed. If you think about it: The whole hiring process is solely designed for the sole purpose of testing, if a person will fit into your company. If the fit is good, the person will feel engaged. If it is bad, the person will underperform, disturb the well-being of your team, quit internally, be fired or leave the company. But with 85% of the employees feeling disenganged and high firing and quitting rates, it seems that the process is 85% of the time wrong and needs to be changed.
And there are well studied science hacks how to flip this number upside down and hire the right candidates 80% of the time! Science has brought us artificial intelligence, improved medicine and a ticket to Mars. But when it comes to hiring, many people still ignore the results science has produced in the field of hiring. We can't talk on the one hand about the "War for Talents" and then on the other hand ignore that our hiring process might be highly underperforming.
For that reason Ansgar Bittermann, CEO of Goldblum, is going to show scientific findings and real life use cases of Goldblum's day2day work on how to use these science-hacks for your advantage and hire the right candidate.

In our special Christmas episode, Ansgar Bittermann, CEO of Goldblum Consulting, is talking to Brother Ken Tsay from the Local Church in Berlin. Ken is originally from Taiwan and after a few years in Switzerland calls Berlin now his home.
Artificial intelligence is developing in a rapid speed and AI applications become more and more human-like in their behavior. As AI is moving closer and closer to show human-like behavior, many people ask themselves if this will have a substantial impact on religions and religions’ self-perception.

Thus in our Christmas special today, Brother Ken and I will try to untangle this question and hopefully give you some answers to this existential question.
We ask "What is a human, what differentiates him from animals?", "What is the Spirit? Is it that bodiless organ which helps us to connect to God?", How does love relate to the Spirit? And could General AI become beings without spirit, eternal beings without the need for god?"

For this podcast about religion, we gave us ground rules. When talking about religion, it is important to be clear and precise to not cause confusion. Fighting about religion is much easier than having an academic, civil discourse.

· First of all, in this Podcast we assume that God exists.

· Secondly, as we are an international truth seeking podcast, we specifically called it broadly “God and AI” and not “the Catholic Church or Islam and AI”. All three book religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) pray to the same God. The God of the Christians is the same God the Jews pray to – the God of their Forefather Abraham. And also in Koran Sure 12:39 says: ”And I follow the religion of my fathers Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.”

· Thirdly, we want to assume that when we talk about God here, we mean the all-mighty God which different religions and cultures gave different names like God, Khodah, Allah or Jehova – but they all mean the same devine being – the Creator of everything.

· And fourthly we assume that God’s word has been distorted over hundreds and thousands of years as humans err and sin. Thus we assume – as in an ML algorithm, you have a true value (e.g. the direct discussion which God had with a prophet) and then over the course of hundreds or even thousands of years this conversation or true value was mostly not correctly handed down from generation to generation or was even purposely changed for political or cultural reasons. For example the famous example of the camel which doesn’t fit through the eye of the needle. Some researchers assume that the original text read camelos which meant rope and not camel. Thus religions nowadays express a religious view (or observant variable) which consists of a true value(God’s word) and an error component (what humans made out of it).
We assume, it is this error component which deflects people’s appreciation of God. We do not oppose religion, but we all have to be aware that human religious expression of any kind is the sum of a true value and an error component. And stressing the erring human component in an religion never critizes God, but takes “the fall of man” into account and applies this to everything we do today. Or as Jesus said: “the one who is without sin, cast the first stone”.
In order to not fight over debatable components in religions (e.g. the subject of baptism or Trinity or denomination) we will focus today solely on the beginning of the three book-religions and will try to find answers in Genesis – The first book of the Christian Bible, the first book of Moses and thus part of the Hebrew bible or Tanakh and also reference for many aspects of Islam.