The In-Between Tech and Trust Podcast

🎙️ Sarah Marie Sandmann, Innovation & Intrapreneurship, Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub
AI trust in defence starts where slides end: with a soldier under pressure who needs to understand, rely on, and account for the technology in their hands. Sarah Marie Sandmann works at the Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub in Innovation and Intrapreneurship, the official innovation unit of the German armed forces. Sandmann treats trust in defence technology as a capability criterion, something tested under pressure, not asserted in policy, and the organisations getting this right are rebuilding how innovation works within the institution itself.
📖 Episode overview
The Bundeswehr is one of Europe's most structurally complex organisations, built for stability, accountability, and risk minimisation, not speed. Sandmann and her colleagues run innovation projects at 12-month cycles that would take years through standard procurement. This episode explores what that tension looks like in practice: how AI is deployed strictly as decision support rather than decision replacement, how soldiers co-develop the technologies they will eventually trust with their lives, and why a trustworthy defence innovation ecosystem would be measured by capabilities delivered rather than the quality of its presentations. Sandmann also reflects on the post-Ukraine shift she has observed from inside the institution — more civilians wanting to contribute, more startups engaging with defence, and what that change means for civil-military trust.
🔍 Key themes
Whether a soldier can understand, rely on, and explain an AI system, and why all three must be true before deployment
The structural case for why large institutions are slow to innovate, and why the people inside them usually aren't the problem
What "decision support, not decision replacement" means as a live design constraint for AI in high-stakes environments
How trust between military institutions and the startup ecosystem is actually built, and what breaks it
What a trustworthy defence innovation ecosystem would need to look like in two to three years
👤 About the guest
Sarah Marie Sandmann works at the Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub in Innovation and Intrapreneurship, the official innovation unit of the German armed forces. She works at the intersection of military capability development, startup collaboration, and responsible technology adoption, collaborating on projects that bring AI, autonomous systems, and emerging technologies into operational use through direct co-development with soldiers. She has been inside the institution through the post-Ukraine shift in civil-military engagement and speaks from that experience with unusual clarity.
⏱ Chapter markers
[00:00] What the Cyber Innovation Hub actually does — and why cockroaches are involved
[03:18] Trust as an operational requirement in defence technology
[08:00] Why innovation resistance is structural, not cultural
[13:09] AI as decision support — the bright line and how it holds
[21:22] The post-Ukraine shift and what a trustworthy ecosystem would look like
🔗 Links
Sarah Marie Sandmann on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-sandmann/
Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/
Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub — https://www.cyberinnovationhub.de/en/
SwarmBioTactics and Autobugs project — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4vu5AKTkJk
Komand.AI and Smart Lead project — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r45um6txpQ
Sonic AI - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9i98jrielw
Related Episode: Why Security Intelligence Fails Before the Attack with Assaf Kipnies - https://open.spotify.com/episode/2D4ODAxGULFbqmXCmgwsfA

🎙️ solo episode with host Eva Simone Lihotzky

Anthropic's frontier AI model was pulled offline for every non-American in three days, and suddenly Europe's AI access looked less like something it owns and more like a permission. This is a week where digital trust stopped being abstract: one US export directive, one warning about Europe's compute future, and one lunch table where the people who build AI sat with the people who govern it. For any leader applying AI inside an organisation, it is a week worth understanding in practice, not as headlines.

🧭 In this episode
In a single week of June 2026, three events landed that most coverage treated as separate. Eva reads them as one thread. The US Commerce Department forced Anthropic's Fable and Mythos models offline for any foreign national. The Europe 2031 agenda argued that Europe's window to matter in AI is closing faster than its own authors had predicted. And for the first time, Frontier AI lab CEOs sat at the G7 heads-of-state table. The question underneath all three: when access to the most strategic technology of the moment sits on someone else's permission, what does a European organisation actually own? Eva works through what this means for vendor dependency, infrastructure design, and the difference between treating AI sovereignty as a compute problem and treating it as a trust problem.
🔍 Key themes
Why "access" to a frontier AI model may be a permission that someone else can withdraw — and what that does to a strategy built on it
The gap between Europe's AI story as a capital problem and the trust assumption sitting underneath it
What changes for a leader when vendor lock-in stops being a risk slide and becomes a live event
Whether building infrastructure and orchestration across many models is now resilience rather than over-engineering
When the builders of AI also shape the rules that govern it, who represents the people using it
🎙️ About the host
Eva Simone Lihotzky, AI adoption and ethics advisor, formerly MD in one of the largest independent agency groups in Europe and co-author of 10 Moral Questions: How to Design Tech & AI Responsibly. She has spent more than a decade leading AI implementation inside organisations, which is why this episode resists the easy reads — it stays with the gray zone between hypocrisy and conviction, between capital and trust, rather than resolving it. This is a solo reflection: Eva connecting three news events into one question she openly admits is hard to narrow down.
⏱️ Chapters
[00:00] Three news items, one thread
[02:22] A frontier model offline in three days
[08:00] Europe 2031: the window that closed early
[11:30] Mistral, and the scale of the gap
[18:45] The G7 table: builders meet the people who govern them
[25:10] Who represents the ones using the technology
🔗 Links
Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/
Europe 2031 agenda — https://europe2031.ai
10 Moral Questions: How to Design Tech & AI Responsibly — https://www.10moralquestions.com/the-book
Eva's World Economic Forum reflection, January 2026 — The politics of tech on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1RKtxdJWXcQH8vnpnDtgEP?si=wrln7peeSkKb-gotGHYMRg
Eva's World Economic Forum reflection, January 2026 — The politics of tech on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-in-between-tech-and-trust-podcast/id1828521905?l=en-GB&i=1000747143762
Anthropic statement on the Fable / Mythos suspension — https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access

🎙️ Tobias Burkhardt, Founder of The Shift School

AI, trust and learning are on a collision course, and the casualty is judgment. Tobias Burkhardt, founder of the Shiftschool, argues that the way individuals and organisations are adopting AI in learning is a cultural problem: the reflex to make learning faster and cheaper is precisely what makes AI dangerous to the people using it. This conversation is for anyone who suspects the upskilling programmes around them are solving for the wrong problem.
💡 Episode overview
Tobias Burkhardt has spent years advising organisations on learning and organizational development, and his diagnosis is uncomfortable: cognitive atrophy is real, it is already happening, and it predates AI. The impulse to shortcut understanding — to reach for the tool before doing the thinking — is a cultural pattern that AI accelerates but did not create. In this conversation, he makes the case for treating AI as a relational technology rather than a productivity instrument, and for rebuilding learning around curation, community, and continuity rather than content delivery. He also names something most learning institutions will not: that the ultimate goal of good education is to make oneself obsolete.
🔑 Key themes
Why treating AI as a tool rather than a collaborator is ill-advised, and what the alternative requires
The faster-and-cheaper reflex in organisational learning, and why it compounds the problem it is meant to solve
What a school without content actually means, and what takes content's place
The bilateral responsibility in learning, and why self-discipline alone will never be sufficient
Trust as an investment: why waiting for certainty before engaging with AI is the wrong posture
🎤 About the guest
Tobias Burkhardt is the founder of The Shiftschool, a learning institution he built because he loved learning and never liked schools. He advises organisations on learning strategies and has developed a philosophy of education built around what does not change — judgment, curation, social interaction, and continuity — rather than around the tools and content that do. His concept of a school without content is a practical response to the decreasing half-life of knowledge in an AI-native world.
⏱ Chapter markers
[00:00] Can we trust ourselves to use AI — not just trust AI itself
[04:00] Why the information abundance problem predates AI
[08:30] From tool to collaborator to environment — how the relationship with AI evolves
[11:00] Cognitive atrophy and the shortcutting reflex
[18:30] Lifelong learning as personal obligation — and why institutions cannot wait
[22:30] The school without content — what takes knowledge's place
[30:00] Redesigning Shift School for an AI-native world

🔗 Links
Tobias Burkhardt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meetropoly/
Eva Lihotzky on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/
Visit the Shift School: https://shiftschool.de
Listen to the related episode with Simon Berkler on organisational AI adoption or trust in digital systems (EP 22): https://open.spotify.com/episode/6y8PMaVUnZVAR1hOAR15DN

🎙️ with Magnus Strobel, Co-Founder and CEO of Nexus Politics

Trust in politics has been eroding across Western democracies for over a decade, and Magnus Strobel thinks the failure is in how democracy works, in the process that has stopped feeling participatory. His company, Nexus Politics, is a for-profit platform built to map the distance between what citizens actually think and what politicians actually do - and to make that distance impossible to ignore.

🔍 Episode overview
This is a conversation about whether transparency can rebuild participation once the machinery of democracy has stopped feeling participatory. It is also about a quieter problem: how a founder building a trust instrument decides whether anyone actually trusts it.
Magnus Strobel and his team create an architecture for a digital democracy platform: how citizen opinion gets routed to the right political actors, how the system maps public sentiment in real time, and where accountability is supposed to live. The harder questions arrive underneath: Why build this as for-profit rather than not-for-profit, and why that choice is the one that makes political neutrality credible. What politicians say they want from such a tool, and why their enthusiasm might mean less compared to how they use it specifically. It is a founder's conversation that keeps circling back to a single uncertainty: you can build the mechanism for trust, but you cannot yet prove the trust is there.

⚖️ Key themes
Why the crisis is in how democracy functions, not in democracy itself - and what that distinction changes
How a for-profit structure becomes the argument for political neutrality
Mapping the gap between what voters think and what politicians do
What politicians actually want from civic tech, and why positive feedback is the hardest signal to trust
Tech as a tool that can repair democratic trust or deepen the damage, depending on who uses it and how

🤝 About the guest
Magnus Strobel is co-founder of Nexus Politics, a digital democracy platform built to rebuild participation and accountability in representative democracies. His background is in behavioral economics, which surfaces throughout the conversation in his attention to the gap between what a system is designed to do and what people actually do with it. He builds from Munich, embedded in the local startup ecosystem, with a stated ambition modelled partly on Taiwan's experience of using participation tools to lift satisfaction with democracy.

🌍 Chapter markers
[00:09] What comes to mind when a democracy founder thinks about trust
[02:59] Opening the fragmented machinery of politics - participation, transparency, accountability
[05:59] Why for-profit is the route to credible neutrality
[16:08] The hardest part is always reality - and what politicians really want
[22:49] Can tech rebuild democratic trust, or does it cut both ways
[35:48] In-between moments: trust, division, and where a founder sits right now

⛓️‍💥 Links
Nexus Politics:  www.nexuspolitics.org
Magnus Strobel LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/strobelmagnus/
Audrey Tang / Taiwan digital democracy: https://www.demnext.org/people/audrey-tang
Rebuild conference, Copenhagen: https://www.rebuild.net
Related episode - Rebuilding Trust: Tech, Politics and Entrepreneurial Leadership (EP 06)

Europe and China are on different AI paths at different speeds. Vincent Xiang has spent years inside that corridor: He has been working as a translator between Chinese AI founders and European investors and corporates, and this conversation dives into his experiences, conversations, and operations on the ground and in-between.
🧭 Episode overview
European executives are excited about Chinese AI momentum. But they're also stuck before they act. Chinese founders interpret some of Europe's regulations as inefficiency. Both sides are operating with simplified labels that are accurate enough to feel right and wrong enough to produce bad decisions. Vincent walks through what he actually sees on the ground - why trust in China gets delegated to systems rather than built between strangers, why "AI superpower" and "surveillance dystopia" both miss the territory, why fragmentation is now treated as permanent reality by founders, and what European companies serious about engaging China should do before they book a single meeting.
🔍 Key themes discussed
The different first questions Europe and China ask about new technology, and what each one produces downstream
Trust as delegated infrastructure - the Alipay escrow story and why people trust the system rather than the strangers in it
Why both Western labels for Chinese AI are wrong in the same direction, and what gets missed when leaders operate with them
The three-layer coordination of government, platforms, and institutions in China, and what its absence looks like in Europe
Fragmentation as the new permanent reality, and why compliance has to be built in as a product feature from day one
👤 About the guest
Vincent Xiang is the founder of China AI Connect, a research and advisory practice helping European investors and corporates evaluate whether Chinese AI is relevant to their strategy, and helping Chinese founders understand the European market. He lived in Germany for seven years, writes the China AI Connect briefings on Chinese AI and deep-tech policy and players, and organises executive trips that bring European leaders to meet founders and operators on the ground. His vantage point is one of the few that sits genuinely between the two systems.
⏱️ Chapter markers
[00:55] The first word that comes to mind: difference
[05:00] People trust the system, not the strangers in it
[12:01] Why "AI superpower" and "surveillance dystopia" both miss the territory
[19:00] Three layers of coordination: government, platforms, institutions
[22:30] Fragmentation as permanent reality, and compliance as a product feature
[35:00] The robotics inflection and what favourable policy makes possible
🔗 Links
Vincent Xiang on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/yxiangeclille/
China AI Connect on Substack - https://vincentxiang.substack.com
AI 2030 / AI Plus initiative reference - https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/xw/zyjh/202509/t20250924_11715960.html
Related episode - Episode on Trust as Geopolitical Requirement: Eva's WEF 2026 recap - https://open.spotify.com/episode/1RKtxdJWXcQH8vnpnDtgEP?si=u_MfnmOvQ2-AXSPRONX6Gw