Dubai · building enterprise AI

Enterprise AI by day. Human questions the rest of the time.

I'm Andy — a technology leader at SAP, where I help large organizations across the Middle East put AI to work. Off the clock I think about the other half of the equation: leadership, attention, and what stays human as the machines get good.

Journey

Dresden to Dubai

Grew up in eastern Germany. Studied and built a career around Mannheim. Then the Gulf — Riyadh, and now Dubai. Four places, one long arc. Drag the globe.
Lived — Dresden · Mannheim · Riyadh · Dubai Worked — Moscow · Paris · Vienna · Zürich · Birmingham · Seoul · San Francisco
Now

What I'm focused on

A snapshot, kept honest and current.
Updated June 2026 · inspired by Derek Sivers' /now
Reading

On the shelf

What's shaping how I think right now.
The Courage to Be Disliked
Kishimi & Koga
Adlerian psychology, hard-edged. The line between other people's expectations and your own life.
Re-reading
Dopamine Nation
Anna Lembke
Why abundance makes us restless — and the discipline of seeking discomfort on purpose.
Applying
The Untethered Soul
Michael A. Singer
The voice in your head is not you. Useful in a hyper-optimized life.
Slow read
Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor Frankl
The one I keep returning to. Meaning over comfort, always.
Foundational
Writing

Notes & essays

Thinking out loud at the intersection of enterprise AI, leadership, and human development.
What does leadership mean when the AI does the analysis?Draft Notes from 24 years inside one companyDraft Building a personal AI system that actually runs your lifeDraft Staying present in an optimized lifeDraft
Exploring

Questions I'm sitting with

The honest version: things I don't have answers to yet.
When AI handles the thinking, what is a leader actually for?
How do you stay genuinely present when every hour can be optimized?
What's the right way to use technology to deepen human connection instead of replacing it?
What does a meaningful second half of life look like — and when do you start building it?
On Leading People

What I've come to believe

Twenty-four years in enterprise technology teaches you a lot about strategy, execution, and results. But the longer I've been at it, the more certain I've become about something that doesn't show up in any KPI dashboard.

Leadership runs on trust, fairness, accountability, and authenticity. Not as values written on a wall — but as the actual lived experience people have of their manager, their team, their organisation. Get those four things right, and performance follows. Get them wrong, and no amount of strategy will compensate.

Dieter Lange, one of Europe's most respected leadership thinkers, puts it directly: "If you want performance, you have to offer meaning." And: "They know the how and the what, but not the why. Yet that very why is the foundation of true leadership."

That's what I keep coming back to. Not the numbers — those are the output. The real question is whether the people you lead trust you, feel treated fairly, can count on what you say, and experience you as genuine. That's the input everything else is built on. It's taken me a long time to be able to say it simply. But I believe it completely.

About

Short version

I've spent more than two decades at SAP, most of it helping large enterprises actually adopt new technology — lately, AI. I'm German, based in Dubai, and I split my attention between hard technical problems and softer human ones: how people lead, decide, and stay well under pressure.

I'm a father of two, a lifelong athlete, and a long-term thinker — about technology, about money, about how to live. This site is where I share a bit of that in public.

VP & GM · SAP INSEAD AMP Harvard Business School Exec 24 yrs in enterprise tech