The In-Between Tech and Trust Podcast

🎙️ with Wolf Ingomar Faecks, Entrepreneur, Investor, Advisory Board Member

Wolf Ingomar Faecks spent 30 years leading digital transformation. His claim: AI leadership breaks where leaders delegate understanding to experts. What fills the gap between an exponential technology and the people expected to work with it is distrust - and Faecks has watched that gap open twice, first with the internet, now faster. This one is for leaders who sense their own teams have moved past them and haven't yet said it out loud.
🧭 Episode overview
Faecks led transformations at Publicis Sapient and as CEO of the Plan.Net Group before leaving the corporate path in early 2025. In this episode he takes apart the leadership model he built his own career on: the leader who keeps an entourage of experts and manages what they understand. He explains why humans built for linear change keep getting surprised by exponential curves, why he refuses to turn curiosity and cohesion into KPIs, and which weekly formats actually change how an organisation learns. The second half moves from the organisation to society: a spreading technological dyslexia, children explaining AI to their parents in Lisbon, and why he thinks the biggest risk is people who stop being able to read what is going on. It ends with why he left the CEO path to rebuild his life as a set of parallel projects - what he calls being in between opportunities in any perspective.
🔍 Key themes
If humans think in straight lines, who in the organisation is responsible for seeing the curve?
Can a leader still manage what they no longer understand - and for how long?
Why measuring curiosity might be the fastest way to kill it
Distrust as the default state of technology adoption, not the exception
What happens to a society where a growing group loses command of the language technology speaks

👤 About the guest
Wolf Ingomar Faecks was CEO of the Plan.Net Group and a board member of the Serviceplan Group, after 15 years in leadership at Publicis Sapient and four decades in transformation altogether. Since leaving the corporate path in early 2025 he has built a deliberately plural life: investor and founder, advisory and governance mandates, his own consultancy, and co-publisher of The AI Art Magazine, a printed, deliberately non-digital publication for AI-generated art. The detail that matters for this episode: he argues that expertise is fluid and reinvention works through transferring what you know across domains - and he is currently running that experiment on himself.
⏱ Chapters
[01:01] A tool for a few, a riddle for many - why distrust is the starting condition
[06:53] The end of the expert entourage - bridges some leaders won't cross
[14:47] The KPI refusal - why culture is modelled, not measured
[23:30] Technological dyslexia - the illiteracy that splits societies
[28:23] Staying real - leave, love or change

🔗 Links
Wolf Ingomar Faecks on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/wolf-ingomar-faecks/
The AI Art Magazine - https://www.art-magazine.ai
Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/
NFC Summit Lisbon - https://www.art-magazine.ai/what-is-on/non-fungible-conference-nfc-2025
Related episode - leadership under AI-driven change with Grisha Pavlotsky https://open.spotify.com/episode/7whSlaCh2lQtafQ37LQktQ

🎙️ with Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker, Director General MATTER Group

Where does AI trust get built between people whose fields are drifting apart? Physicist Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker spends millions engineering the rooms where that happens, and she counts what comes out of them. This episode is for anyone who has sat through a briefing on a technology that will reshape their sector, understood roughly none of it, and said nothing.

🧬 In this episode
Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker looks at biology the way an engineer looks at infrastructure: a technology stack with billions of years of development behind it, already solving data storage, energy capture and intelligence at a level we cannot replicate. Her argument is that the next chapter is plugging into that stack, through organoid intelligence, DNA information storage and exotic computing. The obstacle she describes is not scientific. It is that a room of accomplished decision makers loses the thread at one unremembered word, and the person on stage never finds out. Her answer costs money: an eight-minute limit on every talk, five people assigned to each speaker, environments built to produce the feeling of a science museum. She also holds a position that has cost her invitations, which is that the future is going to be fine.
🧭 Key themes
Whether biology is better understood as finished engineering than as nature, and what co-opting it would actually involve
Why explaining frontier science more clearly does not fix comprehension across fields, and what does
Whether optimism about technology is a discipline or a blind spot, and who benefits from the alternative
What a leader does when the honest answer about the next five years is that there isn't one
Who gets access to the rooms where trust between fields is built, and what follows from that

🔬 About the guest
Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker is a condensed matter physicist who spent a decade on graphene, including a stretch running the US National Graphene Association in her early thirties, before moving to the problem of getting frontier science across the gaps between fields. She is Director General of MATTER, a community of around 20,000 scientists, engineers, policymakers and business leaders spanning 30 country chapters, and Chief Creator of PUZZLE X in Barcelona and XPANSE in Abu Dhabi. She grew up in a family half artist and half scientist, kept the art half quiet for years while working in materials, and now runs ART Proxima, which pairs new media artists with scientists. That detail matters for this conversation more than any of the titles, because the rooms she builds are the correction to a room she once had to be careful in.

⏱ Chapters
[00:48] A physicist stops being excited about physics
[08:20] What breaks when experts talk to experts
[14:41] Optimism as the unpopular position
[27:22] Why having no plan is something she had to build for
[33:26] The room as infrastructure

🔗 Links
Zina Jarrahi Cinker on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/zinacinker/
Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - add URL]
MATTER - amptnetwork.com
PUZZLE X, Barcelona -http://www.puzzlex.io
XPANSE, Abu Dhabi - www.xpanse.world
ART Proxima - https://www.xpanse.world/art-proxima
Solimán López, artist and ART Proxima co-curator - https://solimanlopez.com
Related episode - Beyond the black box: Building trust with AI systems: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6yKMLQNnDoa6NqqClJrryN

🎙️ with podcast host Eva Simone Lihotzky
Responsible AI stops being a compliance exercise the moment an agent acts without you. Only 21% of organisations deploying AI agents have a mature governance model for them, and 35% concede they could not shut one down if it went wrong. This episode is for leaders running agentic pilots who could not, if pressed, name the person who answers when one of them fails.
🧭 Episode overview
Eva Simone Lihotzky takes the Harvard Business Review's claim that trust is becoming a competitive advantage and tests it against what she sees inside client organisations. The episode traces the move from generative to agentic to physical AI and argues that each transfer of autonomy changes what trust has to cover: you check an output before it leaves your hands, you check an action once it is already out and handed on, and with physical systems you are trusting a consequence that has already happened. From there it turns to governance, a word she concedes lands badly in most rooms, and to why she thinks the structures behind the technology are the part that compounds. Underneath runs a question she leaves open: technology needs defined inputs, guardrails and outcomes, creative work needs close to the opposite, and she does not claim to know where the line between them sits. It closes on five questions leaders can run against their own systems, and on why a narrative built around efficiency makes resistance the rational response.
🪜 Key themes
Why each step up the autonomy ladder is also a step up the trust ladder, and why the moment you could still check arrives later at every rung
What survives when the models get replaced, and why accountability lines outlast vendor and architecture decisions
Whether governance slows an organisation down, or is the reason it can move at all
Where technical specification and creative freedom have to be negotiated, and why that negotiation never settles
What an unowned decision costs, and the five questions that expose one
🤝 About the host
[PLACEHOLDER - see flag below. Structure to fill: Eva as founder of raidiant, the client work that produces the governance argument, and her governance and assurance background, which is the specific detail that matters for this episode because it is why she can concede how badly the word lands and argue for it anyway. Co-author of '10 Moral Questions: How to Design Tech & AI Responsibly', referenced in the episode as prior art for building governance into the design stage.]
⏱️ Chapter markers
[03:27] Where the human stops being the operator
[08:12] Trusting the output, then the action, then the consequence
[12:16] Outstructuring the competition while the models keep changing
[16:53] What technology needs defined, and what creative work needs left open
[22:14] Five questions, and the decision with no name attached

🔗 Links
Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/
raidiant - https://www.raidiant.eu
Harvard Business Review, "Responsible AI is Becoming a Growth Strategy" - https://hbr.org/2026/07/responsible-ai-is-becoming-a-growth-strategy
Stanford AI Index 2026 - https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report
McKinsey research on agentic AI risk and security concerns: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/tech-and-ai/our-insights/tech-forward/state-of-ai-trust-in-2026-shifting-to-the-agentic-era
Informatica CDO Insights 2026: https://www.informatica.com/about-us/news/news-releases/2026/01/20260127-new-global-cdo-report-reveals-data-governance-and-ai-literacy-as-key-accelerators-in-ai-adoption.html
Writer research on AI strategy and rogue agents: https://writer.com/blog/enterprise-ai-adoption-2026/
IBM research on agent decision-making visibility: https://community.ibm.com/community/user/blogs/sarah-bowden/2025/11/18/agentic-ai-is-here-5-key-learnings-from-ibms-lates
10 Moral Questions: How to Design Tech & AI Responsibly: https://www.10moralquestions.com/the-book

🎙️ with Erdem Ovacik
AI trust in our institutions is falling, and Erdem Ovacik argues it will keep falling. The technology is not what fails him here. The governance underneath it was never built to earn that trust, and pouring more AI into unfit democratic institutions is like adding fuel to a fire no one has learned to contain. This is for anyone watching their organisation or their government absorb technology faster than it can govern it.

🎧 Episode overview
Ovacik has spent his career at the point where technology meets public life, and he starts from an uncomfortable claim: we are becoming more capable of trusting our institutions, and we won't. He walks through why representative democracy - one national representative for every fifty thousand people - concentrates power in a way that markets and modern tech companies solved for long ago, and asks what democracy would look like if it learned from them. Eva presses him on where technology solves the problem and where it amplifies it, on what he means by "tech naivety," and on the danger of handing decisions to an AI that becomes its own black box. The conversation sits with Europe's harder bind: build real technological competence, or live inside infrastructure and decisions shaped by those who did. It closes on what daily life might feel like if the next democracy actually arrived.

🔑 Key themes
Why adding more technology to a broken institution accelerates the loss of trust rather than repairing it
Whether a system built for fifty thousand people per representative can be governed at all in an age of AI
The line between AI as a consulted voice and AI as a new black box that decides for us
Europe's choice between building its own AI competence and depending on decisions made elsewhere
What it means to keep human agency when the machine could, in theory, write better policy than we can

👤 About the guest
Erdem Ovacik is a social innovator, entrepreneur, and author of The Next Democracy. He built Donkey Republic, one of the first app-based bike-share systems, which is the detail that matters most here: he argues from inside the technology industry, not against it. His warning that technology "almost necessarily" harms society because addiction is good business carries weight precisely because he has spent years building the kind of product he now scrutinises.

🕒 Chapter markers
[01:22] Why we could trust our institutions more, and won't
[02:52] Fifty thousand to one: the power concentration inside representative democracy
[06:39] Tech naivety, and the fire you keep adding fuel to
[11:42] The handlebar problem: who sets the priorities, and where AI belongs
[13:35] Europe's bind, and what happens when the black box is built elsewhere
[17:48] What the next democracy would feel like to live in

🔗 Links
Erdem Ovacik on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erdemovacik/
Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/
The Next Democracy book - https://nextdemocracy.com
Related episode - Tech & Democracy and how both can be connected to create trust with Nexus Politics - https://open.spotify.com/episode/3WVnBsaz3LfFPwn6xsX1N6

🎙️ Dr. Charlotte Blum - Director Change & Organisational Design, edding Group
Two fears run underneath every AI rollout, and most companies manage neither. Dr. Charlotte Blum works the human emotions of AI transformation - the fear, identity, and trust that decide whether adoption sticks - from a board-level role most organisations don't have. This is a conversation about why people resist AI, and why the technology itself may be the hardest thing in the room to trust.
📌 The episode
Charlotte Blum was hired after an agility transformation failed, into a staff function reporting to the board, to do the thing change management usually skips: work with what people feel. In this conversation she separates two fears companies tend to blur - fear of the technology and fear of change itself - and argues that AI destabilises people at the level of identity, not workflow. She makes a case that AI is structurally untrustworthy for an unexpected reason: it has no self-interest. A system built only to please will give you the answer it thinks you want, not the true one. Asked whether she has seen an organisation genuinely succeed at AI transformation, her answer is short, and it isn't yes. For any leader who suspects the resistance in their team is emotional rather than logistical, this is a conversation about what the roadmap leaves out.
🧠 What you'll sit with
Why the fear of AI arrives before the technology does, and why it's measurable
Why an organisation that can't move someone's desk won't move them to AI
What happens to a person when their role, and their sense of self-worth, is suddenly in question
Why a tool built to please can't be relied on to tell you the truth
Why the thing to optimise for is trust, not results, not time
👤 About the guest
Dr. Charlotte Blum is Director Change & Organisational Design at the edding Group, where she leads AI and organisational transformation from a rare board-facing position that treats the emotional side of change as core work rather than an afterthought. Her method is to enable leaders for the conversations no job description trained them for, and she has the internal data suggesting it moves the numbers.
⏱️ Chapters 
[00:00] Trust too much, or not at all - the problem with both
[02:16] Why AI is a human shift, not a technology one
[07:12] The skill capitalism doesn't want you to build
[13:48] Why leaders are handed a job they were never trained for
[30:22] The trust equation, and where AI breaks it
[38:11] Three things an organisation must get right
🔗 Links
Dr. Charlotte Blum on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-charlotte-blum/

edding Group - https://www.edding.com
The trust equation (credibility + reliability + intimacy / self-orientation) - https://people-shift.com/articles/the-trust-equation/
AllBright Academy - https://www.allbright-stiftung.de/academy
Related episode - Why Empathy Can't be Automated with Gifty Enright - https://open.spotify.com/episode/5NYYRgwROaiZLHur5gbksw