Marcus Nessler has been Head of Customer Experience since 2008, designing the customer experience of Samsung Electronics GmbH. In addition to the strategic development and management of contact centers, these include digital services, content management, social media, and service marketing. Together with his team, he built Samsung in recent years for multiple award-winning test winner in the service. After graduating in business administration (BA) he worked as a lawyer at Hewlett-Packard in various German and worldwide management functions.

Xaver Scheffer is part of the voice team at the BR, the public service broadcasting of Bavaria. Together with his colleagues he is developing the company's strategy for digital assistants.

Still studying at Munich's Academy of Fine Arts in 2013 he started working as a news editor for BR's radio stations.

Sebastian Spang is the Director of the digital section of BurdaNews and is responsible, among other things, of digital product management for the TV Feature Film, TV Today, Cinema, Fit For Fun, Focus Magazine and Playboy brands. After several years in mobile product management, his focus is now on the further development of the existing portfolio and the establishment of new digital business models.

Christian Wendrock-Prechtl has been Head of the User Interface division at comdirect since 2015 and also sits on the supervisory board of onvista media GmbH. Previously, the graduate designer was Head of Design Competence Center at T-Systems, Head of Usability Competence Center at Telekom Deutschland GmbH and Head of Usability Competence Center at SIEMENS AG.

Marie-Luise Sessler is co-founder and head of the InnovationLab of Frankfurter Sparkasse.

In addition to her doctorate in medieval philosophy, she studied economics and worked at various banks. In 2015, she joined Frankfurter Sparkasse as a speaker on the board. At her own request, in 2016, she was lent to Helaba for the digitization strategy project and subsequently founded the Innovation department at Frankfurter Sparkasse. In 2017 she was awarded the Digital Female Leader Award.

Her research interests are currently in robot ethics (how man and machine can peacefully coexist in the future) and in the further development of UX design into a social experience design that also brings a fresh start to classic business ethics.

Dougal has been Head of Digital Experience and Engagement at Leeds Beckett University for the past six and a half years and is responsible for the delivery of all of their public digital outputs and online recruitment marketing. In his time there he has led the development of the University’s digital and social media strategies, overseen the implementation of a new CMS and the transfer of over 35,000 web pages to it, developed the Leeds Beckett app and was responsible for the small matter of rolling out the University’s rebrand when it changed its name from Leeds Metropolitan. In the summer of 2017 Dougal and his team implemented Chatbot technology that enabled the University to make course enrolment offers online during clearing, being the first institution in the world to offer this functionality. In 2018 they followed this up by developing an Amazon Alexa app to deliver the same function.

Alexander Wodrich founded the audio branding agency why do birds in 2010. Located in Berlin they employ 15 people working in music-production, brand consulting, graphic and motion-design. Their clients include such brands as Siemens, Hyundai, Deutsche Bahn or GORE-TEX. Alexander has a degree in business and has also been a musician for the most part of his life. Before founding why do birds, he was a member of the MetaDesign management board, responsible for the audio branding and motion graphics departments.

Curious at heart, Rafael loves trying out new technologies. Exploring voice interfaces was love at first hearing. He organized hackathons and other events with focus on Alexa before joining Amazon. As a technical evangelist for Amazon Alexa, he educates developers, designers, enthusiasts, and businesses about voice technology.

Hannes Ricklefs is a Lead Architect within the BBC’s Technology, Strategy, and Architecture team, which drives the transformation of the BBC’s technology landscape and media capabilities. Before joining the BBC to work on Frameworks, Automation, and Human Centricity, Hannes worked for over a decade in feature film VFX, building platforms that enabled the global production of Oscar-winning productions such as Disney’s Jungle Book.

Dipl. Wirtschaftsingenieur
Head of buying in der Otto Group
Director Non Food Tchibo
Director Capsule Systems (Qbo und Cafisimo) Tchibo

Kristian Hillmann is responsible for the Deutsche Bahn skill on Amazon Alexa and the further development of the brand presence on digital assistants. He also focuses on the use of AI in customer interaction and has been responsible for online sales partners selling DB tickets worldwide since 2014. Before joining Deutsche Bahn, Hillmann studied Marketing & Sales and already devoted himself to innovative forms of brand presentation on the Internet in his master thesis.

Pierluigi Fasano is currently working in Swiss Re with a double hat, one being Head of Enterprise Architecture for Reinsurance and the other Practice Leader for IoT Competence Cluster. He is a passionate technology leader with solid track in transitioning organizations towards higher level of performance and efficiency. He started his career when the IBM Personal Computer was "coming soon" and the startups were just called "small companies". He has grown up across important international experiences in multicultural organizations and crossing several industries like Allianz Group, Novartis and The Global Fund. Currently he devotes most of his time to develop and realize the vision of a digital Insurance that help people supporting a connected lifestyle. In this context, he lives and breathes IoT, Artificial Intelligence, hyper-cloud, micro-services and whatever else can bring Insurance into the right century. When he is not working, reading a book or cooking there is a high chance to find him around a football field screaming loud to support his two boys playing on the pitch.

Christoph is a conversation-first evangelist and Head of VUI Design at VUI.agency. With his team of voice architects, linguists and language specialists, he has supported major international clients in building their own voice frameworks as well as leveraging existing platforms like Alexa or Google Assistant. Christoph strongly believes in the power of good conversations and his vision is making conversational interfaces the user interface of the future.

His passion is to figure out the best way to mix human talent and technology. During the last 14 years Alejandro has been working for Microsoft developing the strategy for sites like www.office.com and www.windows.com across multiple regions. He is currently leading the team developing Cortana for 12 of the international markets: UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, China, Canada and India. Alejandro developed his career combining 3 lines of work: Marketing, Business Development and Sales, and he has worked in most of the areas of Information Technology from: Artificial Intelligence, back end solutions, front end portals, service and access providers, content: strategy, development and acquisition, sales and consulting, commercialization, partner ecosystem, web production, web design and digital marketing.