Bernd Storm
Co-Founder & Co-Host
Sessions (4)
Sessions featuring Bernd Storm at Bits & Pretzels 2026 | Founders Festival in Munich
Bits & Pretzels Opening 2026 - After AI video
The opening message after the AI video was that Bits & Pretzels 2026 wanted attendees to carry one shared question through the next three days: what future are they helping make more likely? The hosts emphasized that the point was not to force people to choose between the video’s positive, negative, or neutral voices on AI, but to use the tension as a conversation starter. They specifically named security, the labor market, and financial markets as areas attendees should think about, and urged people at the coffee bar not to begin with the usual “what are you building?” Instead, they asked the community to first ask one another where they stand on the AI-related questions raised by the video, and only then connect those views to what they are building and in which direction their work may push the future.
Welcome
The opening message of the session was that the CIO AI Summit at Bits and Pretzels is designed to connect corporate decision makers with startup innovation, turning the festival’s founder-and-investor network into a demand-driven opportunity for customers and startups. Bernd Storm welcomed attendees to the third CIO AI Summit, introduced himself as co-founder and managing director of Bits and Pretzels, and explained that after twelve years focused on bringing “the best founders and the best investors” together, the event now also aims to provide customers for founders. He framed customers as “the best investors for all the startups” and pointed to the benefit of placing CIOs in the same venue as 7,500 founders and investors, where they can exchange best practices and visit the startup exhibition to find companies that may help improve their businesses, processes, and products. Storm thanked co-host Niels Doerje, Yassine, Minister Mehring, and the sponsors led by SAP, then encouraged the audience to engage with colleagues in the room and founders outside. Niels Doerje then introduced the day’s format: more than 35 speakers, eight handpicked moderators, and a mix of fireside chats, panels, keynotes, and best-practice sessions. He emphasized making the program more interactive than the previous year by involving the audience through questions and conversation, before introducing Bavarian State Minister of Digital Affairs Fabian Mehring as the first speaker. Mehring welcomed the CIOs, decision makers, fellow ministers, and partners, presenting Bavaria as “the height of high-tech,” “the heart of our tech ecosystem,” and “one of the digital powerhouses of Europe.” He thanked the Bits and Pretzels team for “rolling out the red carpet for the future” and for bringing bright minds from around the world to Munich. He then thanked the decision makers in the audience, saying Bavaria’s progress toward becoming a leading hub for future technologies was not the result of political speeches but of their daily work and decisions. He cited the tech ecosystem index worldwide, investment in future technologies and startups in Bavaria, the Financial Times’ evaluation of leading European tech ecosystems, and investments by companies including Microsoft, AWS, Apple, SAP, and Schwarz Group as signs that Bavaria’s vision is becoming reality. Mehring closed by stressing that success creates responsibility and named issues requiring joint discussion: deregulation, venture capital, digital sovereignty, and answers to warnings from AI developers about technology risks. Christina Sinemus, Minister for Digitalization and Innovation in Hesse, then announced a next-year initiative tied to Bits and Pretzels: roundtables, potentially as a roadshow across Germany and Europe, bringing digitalization ministers, startups, techies, and others together. The goal is to discuss how Europe can increase innovation and venture capital and reduce administrative processes, with European values and technical innovation positioned as assets for digital transformation.
Opening Fireside Chat with Dr. Karsten Wildberger
Dr. Karsten Wildberger’s core message was that AI can become Germany’s leapfrog moment if companies and government treat it as a strategic capability rather than a set of isolated applications. He opened by contrasting two Mittelstand experiences: one company adopted AI but still failed to remove its IT development bottleneck, while another used AI agents to replace a legacy CRM-related core system within ten weeks. From that contrast, he argued that every company has a different starting point, but the practical question should be how AI could reshape the business model itself, including how a new AI-native competitor would attack an incumbent’s position. He then reframed the AI risk debate around three categories. The first two were familiar: misuse by criminals or rogue actors, including cyberattacks or biological weapons, and loss of control, where autonomous agents may pursue unintended goals. Wildberger stressed that companies cannot treat the world as a test bed, should test before shipping, accept independent scrutiny, and remain liable after deployment. The third risk, which he said receives too little attention in Germany, was dependency and lost value creation. If Germany does not build its own AI capabilities and competitive products, he warned that businesses, skilled jobs, value creation, growth, wealth, and independence will move elsewhere. To show that the government is acting, Wildberger cited AC Deutschland, Germany’s AI safety institute being established with the Interior Ministry; support for Law Zero, Joshua Bengio’s nonprofit developing safe-by-design foundation models; and a data center strategy intended by 2030 to at least double overall compute capacity and quadruple AI compute capacity. He also pointed to sovereign cloud infrastructure for the federal system, including German consortia involving SAP with Telecom and Schwarz Digits, as a backbone for digitization and protected environments where Mittelstand companies can use AI while retaining control over industrial knowledge. The speech moved from risk to opportunity by emphasizing industrial AI, frontier model partnerships, and government procurement as demand creation. Wildberger highlighted the combination of Cohere and Aleph Alpha as potentially one of the largest large language model companies outside the US and China, noted Mistral’s Munich office and partnership with SAP, and described SPRK, government AI agents that automate complex infrastructure approvals and cut time and effort by about 85%. In the Q&A opening, the moderator cited a BITKOM study saying 78% of Mittelstand and large corporations in Germany see AI as decisive for competitiveness, while nearly 50% say they are lagging behind; Wildberger responded that adoption must happen much faster, noting that AI diffusion appears slower globally outside China.
One more thing...
The core message of this closing segment was that the most useful measure of success is personal and subjective: Stephen Bartlett’s final takeaway was not to accept anyone else’s formula for how to live, including his own. Asked what he wanted to leave the audience with, he first answered, “Don’t take advice from anybody, including me.” He then explained that this was not a throwaway line, but the point he had intended to make. The value proposition for the audience was direct: instead of adopting success metrics from speakers, social posts, or public examples, attendees should ask themselves how they actually feel about the life they are building. Bartlett illustrated the point with a behind-the-scenes exchange involving Jack, the person who films his show and has observed him for eight years across his previous company, his current company, and his day-to-day work. Bartlett said he asked Jack, on air, whether Jack would like his life. Jack answered “no” immediately, so quickly that Bartlett joked it was almost offensive and might need to be cut from the episode. Bartlett then asked a follow-up question: whether Jack thought he was happy. Jack answered “yes” just as quickly. Bartlett used this contrast to show that two people can reject each other’s lives while both being happy in their own. From that story, Bartlett connected happiness to the proxy word “success.” His conclusion was that no LinkedIn post, no person, and no speaker on the stage should be treated as qualified to define the right life or the right happiness metric for everyone. The only metric he explicitly highlighted was “how do you feel?” The host thanked him and closed his appearance, after which the room was asked not to leave because “one more thing” was still coming. The final portion shifted from Bartlett’s reflection to an unscripted conference announcement. The hosts said that the best things happen unscripted and that Bartlett had just written down a question for someone next year. They added that they had not only prepared Bits 26 over the previous 365 days, but also the opening of Bits 27. After a short video, they announced that everyone had received an email with an exclusive link to a limited best-price ticket offer for next year, framed as a special edition for people in the room, before welcoming the moderators back on stage.