Stephan Schmidt is Europe's CTO Coach and author of the bestselling book Amazing CTO. A computer scientist with a specialisation in artificial intelligence, he brings 40+ years in software, 25+ years in engineering leadership, and three-time founder experience to his work. He has coached 100+ CTOs, VPs of Engineering and founders — from early-stage startups to listed companies — through AI transformation, scaling, and the shift from shipping features to shipping business outcomes.
Date
Every CTO and CIO in digital signage is being asked the same question right now: what is our AI strategy? Everyone is running around, everyone is confused, everyone needs to transform their company - but nobody agrees on how. In this session I argue that most transformation plans fail because they treat AI like the next piece of software to roll out. It isn't. AI changes the economics of software development itself, which means it reshapes vision, strategy, organization, and roles, not just the product roadmap. When building features becomes radically cheap, what happens to companies whose moat was "we can build it"? This session is a guide for technology leaders on what actually changes, what doesn't, and how to land on the winning side of this shift.
Attendees leave with a working model for separating AI-as-software-feature from AI-as-economic-shift, three failure patterns I see repeatedly in CTO-led AI transformations, a framework for deciding what to centralize and what to push to teams, and a set of concrete questions to put on their next leadership-team agenda.
For CTOs, CIOs, VPs of Engineering, and heads of product at digital signage platforms, integrators, and retail-tech companies.