Thought Experiments on the New Leadership in the Age of AI
Did I become a boss to give orders — or to lead people? Is it too much to ask of AI that it take hierarchy off our hands and give leadership back what truly defines it? The Apaches knew this all along.
Location as an efficiency trap: The office of the future is no longer an office.
Responsibility cannot be shared. The only thing you can share is irresponsibility.
AI takes hierarchy off our hands and gives us back the people. Suddenly, leadership is a relationship again.
Through vivid metaphors and examples, your guests grasp what technology can do — and where its limits lie.
what Winnetou teaches us about digital leadership.
Leadership in distributed teams.
Rethinking leadership.
Why systematizing intelligence and neurodiversity become the decisive edge in the age of AI
The Limits, Power and Future of AI Around the Building.
Guidance for Leaders in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
Voices from hosts and audiences.
I kept thinking about Christoph Holz's exciting thought experiments long afterwards. The talk truly inspired me. I was greatly amused by the humorous anecdotes. Keep it up! I'm already looking forward to seeing you again!
★★★★★MWMartina W.
★★★★★Christoph Holz is an extremely inspiring speaker who captivates his audience through a blend of personality, wit and expertise.
TBThomas BergmannDigital Summit Zürich
★★★★★Rhetorically brilliant. That was magnificent. Absolutely magnificent. Absolutely fantastic.
TBTobias Beck · Top-Speaker & Jurymitglied
his talk published on ted.com is based on exactly the format that carries this talk too: provocative thought experiments as a leadership tool.
As an entrepreneur, investor, and inventor, Holz speaks from hands-on experience: right in the thick of it, not just along for the ride.
Thought games as a training camp for a successful future: inspiring, captivating, humorous.
Yes: examples and key topics are tailored to the industry in advance with the organizer — here, for instance, to leadership, the skills shortage, and operationalizing AI.
Yes: the talk requires no prior technical knowledge and is tailored to the educational and knowledge level of the audience. Usually Holz joins in beforehand to get to know his listeners.
Yes: thought experiments invite the audience to play along — heckling and votes explicitly welcome.
Yes — courage, to be precise: vivid stories like the peace pipe with AI spark conversations that last well beyond the evening. Christoph Holz is deliberately optimistic — technology as a tool that strengthens your leaders.
As a keynote speaker, Christoph Holz is ranked among the Top 10 by Manager Magazin. Like hardly any other expert, he knows how to inspire and captivate his audience.
As a lecturer, Holz teaches Digital Ethics to aspiring engineers at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. Ethics must not moralize with a wagging finger. As Ethics by Design, it has to be part of the development process from the very start.
Oberösterreichische Nachrichten: Digitalethiker Holz ↗
In May 2026, Holz visited the Magna Steyr plant in Graz — the Mercedes G-Class production line from the inside.
Christoph Holz is featured as a TED Speaker on the original TED.com platform.
TED.COM ↗
Whether machines can read feelings, Christoph Holz checked right at the source: at Tawny.AI in Munich he saw how AI recognizes emotions from faces, at audEERING how it reads moods from the voice, at jambit the applications across all industries — plus the SHORE real-time facial recognition from Fraunhofer IIS. On stage he answers the question of why AI can recognize emotions without ever feeling them — and what that means for care, consulting, and advertising.
On stage, Holz shows how companies turn ChatGPT, Anthropic & Co. into business success — and where the limits lie.