--- title: Executive Education · Falk Uebernickel url: https://uebernickel.com/executive-education author: Falk Uebernickel description: Executive seminars, custom programmes, talks and university teaching by Falk Uebernickel on AI leadership, digital transformation and design thinking. --- # Executive Education Most of my time I spend with leaders in executive seminars: on digital transformation, human-centered design, and how organisations bring AI into their work while people stay in charge. ## Executive seminars Open programmes, where leaders from many organisations learn together. - 2026 – present: **AI Studio and the Future of Work, University of St.Gallen.** Three hands-on days in which leaders stop talking about AI and start working with it. They build their own assistants and agents with frontier models, turn real processes into working prototypes, and leave with a personal 90-day plan. (Switzerland) - 2024 – present: **CAS Digital Innovation and Business Transformation, University of St.Gallen.** My module on business model innovation. Over three days, participants apply design thinking to cases from their own organisations and explore how work changes when people and AI share it, ending with a concrete plan for their transfer project. (Switzerland) - 2023 – 25: **Design thinking for the public sector, IDHEAP, University of Lausanne.** A bootcamp in citizen-centred design for public managers. Participants go into the field, learn what citizens really need, and prototype and test new services early, while changes are still cheap and the people affected can still shape them. (Switzerland) - 2014 – present: **Executive MBA in Business Engineering, University of St.Gallen.** As principal lecturer I teach digital entrepreneurship, digital transformation and agile work. I also lead the study trips to San Francisco and Berlin, where participants meet the founders, investors and companies shaping the next wave of technology. (Switzerland) - 2014 – present: **CAS Digital Leadership and Transformation, University of St.Gallen.** A practical bootcamp in human-centred design and agile working for leaders. In a live case lab, teams take on a real challenge, talk to the people affected, build prototypes and present their solution to the group on the final day. (Switzerland) - 2014 – present: **Management for the Legal Profession, University of St.Gallen.** Design thinking for lawyers. Participants learn to look at legal work through their clients’ eyes: understanding real needs, generating ideas, and prototyping and testing new ways to design and deliver legal services, from the first contact to the final advice. (Switzerland) - 2014 – 17: **Design thinking in the MBA HSG, University of St.Gallen.** An elective in which full-time MBA students from around the world learn design thinking by doing it. In mixed teams they move through fieldwork, synthesis, ideation, prototyping and testing on a concrete innovation challenge, and present what they learned. (Switzerland) - 2014: **Managing for the future, Aalto University Part-time MBA.** Innovation management and service design for experienced managers. Together with the Innovation Management Institute, we worked on idea management, foresight, prototyping and new business models, applied in groups to challenges from the participants’ own companies. (Finland) ## Custom programmes Programmes designed for one organisation. Clients are not named. - 2026: **AI leadership for a luxury goods group.** How do you lead when almost every task can be supported by AI? Together with the operations leaders, we worked out where AI should take over, where people must stay in charge, and what that means for leading their teams. (France) - 2026: **AI leadership for a premium chocolate maker.** A brand built on craft meets artificial intelligence. With its leaders, we explored how AI can support the daily work without diluting what makes the brand special, and what good leadership looks like when AI joins the team. (Switzerland) - 2025: **Sustainable innovation for a testing and certification company.** In a country that draws almost all its electricity from renewable sources, the leadership team explored how sustainability can become a source of new business rather than a compliance task. Run with the University of St.Gallen. (Iceland) - 2024: **Meeting the client: engineers of a luxury sports car manufacturer.** We took the engineering team to Dubai to meet ten of the brand’s most important clients in person. Not to turn engineers into marketers, but to let them see who they build for and what these clients truly value. (United Arab Emirates) - 2020 – present: **Dealer academy for a luxury sports car manufacturer.** Every year, the brand’s best dealers from around the world come together to make each showroom visit exceptional. For years the focus was the customer journey; today it is how AI helps tailor every process and conversation to the individual client. (Germany) - 2017 – 19: **Customer-centric innovation for a Nordic pharmaceutical company.** Over three years, teams from human medicine and animal health took on real business challenges of their own: sharpening the product portfolio, rethinking the marketing approach, and putting the customer at the centre of both, from the first idea to the market. (Finland) - 2017 – 18: **Legal design for two leading law firms.** How can a top law firm become as easy to work with as the best service brands? The lawyers redesigned how they work with their clients, step by step, from the very first contact to the final advice. (Germany and Switzerland) - 2017: **Customer-centric innovation for a maker of analytical instruments.** In one intensive cohort, teams from across the company took on real business challenges. They learned to look at their instruments through their customers’ eyes and turned these insights into first prototypes. (Switzerland) ## Talks More than 200 talks since 2005, at companies, public institutions and scientific conferences. They cluster around six themes. - 2023 – present: **Humans and AI.** How do people and organisations work when AI drafts, decides and acts? My talks bring the evidence together: where AI lifts performance, where it erodes critical thinking, and why leadership shifts from command to orchestration. A recurring idea is that what AI can learn depends on what we can verify, so humans move from doing the work to setting the rules and checking the checkers. (banks, central banks, hospitals, pharma, conferences) - 2014 – present: **Design thinking and human-centred innovation.** The thread through my whole career. From the Stanford roots of design thinking to needfinding in the field and rapid prototyping, these talks show leaders how to innovate from people’s real needs. They are full of cases from banking, mobility and health, and often include a short hands-on sprint so the room experiences the method instead of hearing about it. (banks, insurers, manufacturers, pharma, universities) - 2014 – present: **Digital transformation of organisations and their IT.** Why do some organisations change and others stall? These talks cover agility in IT, the CIO’s move from supplier to partner, the digital workplace and employee experience, and our research on inertia and escalating commitment in transformation projects. (cio networks, banks, public sector, industry) - 2014 – 17: **Industry 4.0, smart services and data-driven business models.** How machine builders move from selling products to selling services: connected assets, predictive maintenance, big data and new business models, from light bulbs to elevators to air conditioning sold by the square metre. (machine builders, industry associations, airports) - 2014 – present: **Learning innovation by doing.** How global student teams solve real challenges for companies within the SUGAR network founded with Stanford, and what this mission-based learning produces: prototypes, patents and start-ups, including one sold for a nine-digit sum. I also speak about design thinking for social impact, from community projects in Nairobi to train-the-trainer workshops in Shanghai. (universities, corporate partners, ministries) - 2022 – present: **Foresight and behaviour.** Two newer threads. Strategic foresight helps leaders explore several futures instead of betting on one roadmap. Research on choice architecture and digital self-nudging shows how digital tools can help people make better decisions. (enterprise architects, alumni, conferences) recent talks - 2026: Synthetic personas: value, limits, rules. E-commerce conference. (switzerland) - 2026: Building the next-generation hospital: AI, data integration and platform thinking. Academic medical centre. (united states) - 2025: Foresight-driven enterprise architecture. Architecture community of a global software company. (germany) - 2025: AI first: what machines can do, and what they cannot. Keynote and workshop for a global bank. (germany) - 2025: Dialog or dictate? Working together in times of AI. Workshop for a central bank. (germany) - 2025: Augmented, not automated: the future of work with AI. International engineering conference. (switzerland) - 2024: AI-enhanced design thinking: innovation beyond the algorithm. Pharmaceutical company. (switzerland) ## Listen and watch - 2023: [Nudging: Kennst du diese Psychotricks?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdkCE4wUCVI) Terra Xplore, ZDF. Video, 17 min. Who nudges us, and is it manipulation? With our HPI experiment on vegetarian choices in the canteen. - 2020: [Agil arbeiten mit Design Thinking](https://podcast.hpi.de/38-agil-arbeiten-mit-design-thinking-gesprach-mit-prof-dr-falk-uebernickel) Neuland, the HPI science podcast. 20 min. How companies introduce agile work, and which expectations are unrealistic. - 2019: [Unternehmen auf Innovationskurs bringen mit Design Thinking](https://podcast.hpi.de/25-unternehmen-auf-innovationskurs-bringen-mit-design-thinking-gesprach-mit-prof-dr-falk-uebernickel) Neuland, the HPI science podcast. 21 min. What makes a company innovative, and why it usually takes a change of culture. - All in German. ## University teaching - 2026 – present: ZHAW, Institute of Marketing Management. Courses to follow. - 2020 – present: Sustainable innovation through human-centered design. Master in Business Innovation and CEMS, University of St.Gallen. - 2019: Human-centered design and requirements engineering, and global team-based innovation. Master level, Hasso Plattner Institute. - 2010 – 19: Design thinking (ME310 and SUGAR), taught with Stanford University: student teams solve real challenges for companies such as Audi, Allianz, SAP and Lufthansa Technik. ## Work with me I give keynotes and workshops and design programmes for leadership teams, often together with the University of St.Gallen. Topics: AI and leadership, human oversight of AI, design thinking and digital transformation. In English or German. Write to me on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/falkue/) or by email: uebernickel@gmail.com