The In-Between Tech and Trust Podcast

Eva Simone Lihotzky

The podcast explores how we build, break, and rebuild trust in a world shaped by accelerating technology and artificial intelligence. Hosted by Eva Simone Lihotzky, AI adoption and ethics expert with 12+ years of experience in tech, the podcast creates in-depth conversations at the intersection of AI, business, ethics, and human connection. Through various lenses - across business, politics, neuroscience, tech and systems thinking in organizations - it hosts expert conversations for you to deep dives into one of the complex topics we need to solve as a society and beyond.

  1. Jul 9

    The Tech Naivety Undermining Democracy - Erdem Ovacik (EP 32)

    🎙️ with Erdem Ovacik AI trust in our institutions is falling, and Erdem Ovacik argues it will keep falling. The technology is not what fails him here. The governance underneath it was never built to earn that trust, and pouring more AI into unfit democratic institutions is like adding fuel to a fire no one has learned to contain. This is for anyone watching their organisation or their government absorb technology faster than it can govern it. 🎧 Episode overview Ovacik has spent his career at the point where technology meets public life, and he starts from an uncomfortable claim: we are becoming more capable of trusting our institutions, and we won't. He walks through why representative democracy - one national representative for every fifty thousand people - concentrates power in a way that markets and modern tech companies solved for long ago, and asks what democracy would look like if it learned from them. Eva presses him on where technology solves the problem and where it amplifies it, on what he means by "tech naivety," and on the danger of handing decisions to an AI that becomes its own black box. The conversation sits with Europe's harder bind: build real technological competence, or live inside infrastructure and decisions shaped by those who did. It closes on what daily life might feel like if the next democracy actually arrived. 🔑 Key themes Why adding more technology to a broken institution accelerates the loss of trust rather than repairing itWhether a system built for fifty thousand people per representative can be governed at all in an age of AIThe line between AI as a consulted voice and AI as a new black box that decides for usEurope's choice between building its own AI competence and depending on decisions made elsewhereWhat it means to keep human agency when the machine could, in theory, write better policy than we can 👤 About the guest Erdem Ovacik is a social innovator, entrepreneur, and author of The Next Democracy. He built Donkey Republic, one of the first app-based bike-share systems, which is the detail that matters most here: he argues from inside the technology industry, not against it. His warning that technology "almost necessarily" harms society because addiction is good business carries weight precisely because he has spent years building the kind of product he now scrutinises. 🕒 Chapter markers [01:22] Why we could trust our institutions more, and won't[02:52] Fifty thousand to one: the power concentration inside representative democracy[06:39] Tech naivety, and the fire you keep adding fuel to[11:42] The handlebar problem: who sets the priorities, and where AI belongs[13:35] Europe's bind, and what happens when the black box is built elsewhere[17:48] What the next democracy would feel like to live in 🔗 Links Erdem Ovacik on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erdemovacik/Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/The Next Democracy book - https://nextdemocracy.comRelated episode - Tech & Democracy and how both can be connected to create trust with Nexus Politics - https://open.spotify.com/episode/3WVnBsaz3LfFPwn6xsX1N6

    The Tech Naivety Undermining Democracy - Erdem Ovacik (EP 32)

  2. Jul 2

    Two Fears Behind Every AI Transformation - Dr. Charlotte Blum (EP 31)

    🎙️ Dr. Charlotte Blum - Director Change & Organisational Design, edding Group Two fears run underneath every AI rollout, and most companies manage neither. Dr. Charlotte Blum works the human emotions of AI transformation - the fear, identity, and trust that decide whether adoption sticks - from a board-level role most organisations don't have. This is a conversation about why people resist AI, and why the technology itself may be the hardest thing in the room to trust. 📌 The episode Charlotte Blum was hired after an agility transformation failed, into a staff function reporting to the board, to do the thing change management usually skips: work with what people feel. In this conversation she separates two fears companies tend to blur - fear of the technology and fear of change itself - and argues that AI destabilises people at the level of identity, not workflow. She makes a case that AI is structurally untrustworthy for an unexpected reason: it has no self-interest. A system built only to please will give you the answer it thinks you want, not the true one. Asked whether she has seen an organisation genuinely succeed at AI transformation, her answer is short, and it isn't yes. For any leader who suspects the resistance in their team is emotional rather than logistical, this is a conversation about what the roadmap leaves out. 🧠 What you'll sit with Why the fear of AI arrives before the technology does, and why it's measurableWhy an organisation that can't move someone's desk won't move them to AIWhat happens to a person when their role, and their sense of self-worth, is suddenly in questionWhy a tool built to please can't be relied on to tell you the truthWhy the thing to optimise for is trust, not results, not time👤 About the guest Dr. Charlotte Blum is Director Change & Organisational Design at the edding Group, where she leads AI and organisational transformation from a rare board-facing position that treats the emotional side of change as core work rather than an afterthought. Her method is to enable leaders for the conversations no job description trained them for, and she has the internal data suggesting it moves the numbers. ⏱️ Chapters  [00:00] Trust too much, or not at all - the problem with both[02:16] Why AI is a human shift, not a technology one[07:12] The skill capitalism doesn't want you to build[13:48] Why leaders are handed a job they were never trained for[30:22] The trust equation, and where AI breaks it[38:11] Three things an organisation must get right 🔗 Links Dr. Charlotte Blum on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-charlotte-blum/ edding Group - https://www.edding.comThe trust equation (credibility + reliability + intimacy / self-orientation) - https://people-shift.com/articles/the-trust-equation/AllBright Academy - https://www.allbright-stiftung.de/academyRelated episode - Why Empathy Can't be Automated with Gifty Enright - https://open.spotify.com/episode/5NYYRgwROaiZLHur5gbksw

    Two Fears Behind Every AI Transformation - Dr. Charlotte Blum (EP 31)

  3. Jun 25

    Tech and Trust at the Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub: Innovating for and with the Troops with Sarah Marie Sandmann (EP 30)

    🎙️ Sarah Marie Sandmann, Innovation & Intrapreneurship, Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub AI trust in defence starts where slides end: with a soldier under pressure who needs to understand, rely on, and account for the technology in their hands. Sarah Marie Sandmann works at the Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub in Innovation and Intrapreneurship, the official innovation unit of the German armed forces. Sandmann treats trust in defence technology as a capability criterion, something tested under pressure, not asserted in policy, and the organisations getting this right are rebuilding how innovation works within the institution itself. 📖 Episode overview The Bundeswehr is one of Europe's most structurally complex organisations, built for stability, accountability, and risk minimisation, not speed. Sandmann and her colleagues run innovation projects at 12-month cycles that would take years through standard procurement. This episode explores what that tension looks like in practice: how AI is deployed strictly as decision support rather than decision replacement, how soldiers co-develop the technologies they will eventually trust with their lives, and why a trustworthy defence innovation ecosystem would be measured by capabilities delivered rather than the quality of its presentations. Sandmann also reflects on the post-Ukraine shift she has observed from inside the institution — more civilians wanting to contribute, more startups engaging with defence, and what that change means for civil-military trust. 🔍 Key themes Whether a soldier can understand, rely on, and explain an AI system, and why all three must be true before deploymentThe structural case for why large institutions are slow to innovate, and why the people inside them usually aren't the problemWhat "decision support, not decision replacement" means as a live design constraint for AI in high-stakes environmentsHow trust between military institutions and the startup ecosystem is actually built, and what breaks itWhat a trustworthy defence innovation ecosystem would need to look like in two to three years👤 About the guest Sarah Marie Sandmann works at the Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub in Innovation and Intrapreneurship, the official innovation unit of the German armed forces. She works at the intersection of military capability development, startup collaboration, and responsible technology adoption, collaborating on projects that bring AI, autonomous systems, and emerging technologies into operational use through direct co-development with soldiers. She has been inside the institution through the post-Ukraine shift in civil-military engagement and speaks from that experience with unusual clarity. ⏱ Chapter markers [00:00] What the Cyber Innovation Hub actually does — and why cockroaches are involved[03:18] Trust as an operational requirement in defence technology[08:00] Why innovation resistance is structural, not cultural[13:09] AI as decision support — the bright line and how it holds[21:22] The post-Ukraine shift and what a trustworthy ecosystem would look like🔗 Links Sarah Marie Sandmann on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-sandmann/Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub — https://www.cyberinnovationhub.de/en/SwarmBioTactics and Autobugs project — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4vu5AKTkJkKomand.AI and Smart Lead project — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r45um6txpQSonic AI - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9i98jrielwRelated Episode: Why Security Intelligence Fails Before the Attack with Assaf Kipnies - https://open.spotify.com/episode/2D4ODAxGULFbqmXCmgwsfA

    Tech and Trust at the Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub: Innovating for and with the Troops with Sarah Marie Sandmann (EP 30)

  4. Jun 19

    Anthropic's Model Suspension, Europe 2031, and G7 World Leaders Lunching with Frontier AI Lab & Tech CEOs: The Week in Tech & Trust with Yours Truly (EP 29)

    🎙️ solo episode with host Eva Simone Lihotzky Anthropic's frontier AI model was pulled offline for every non-American in three days, and suddenly Europe's AI access looked less like something it owns and more like a permission. This is a week where digital trust stopped being abstract: one US export directive, one warning about Europe's compute future, and one lunch table where the people who build AI sat with the people who govern it. For any leader applying AI inside an organisation, it is a week worth understanding in practice, not as headlines. 🧭 In this episode In a single week of June 2026, three events landed that most coverage treated as separate. Eva reads them as one thread. The US Commerce Department forced Anthropic's Fable and Mythos models offline for any foreign national. The Europe 2031 agenda argued that Europe's window to matter in AI is closing faster than its own authors had predicted. And for the first time, Frontier AI lab CEOs sat at the G7 heads-of-state table. The question underneath all three: when access to the most strategic technology of the moment sits on someone else's permission, what does a European organisation actually own? Eva works through what this means for vendor dependency, infrastructure design, and the difference between treating AI sovereignty as a compute problem and treating it as a trust problem. 🔍 Key themes Why "access" to a frontier AI model may be a permission that someone else can withdraw — and what that does to a strategy built on itThe gap between Europe's AI story as a capital problem and the trust assumption sitting underneath itWhat changes for a leader when vendor lock-in stops being a risk slide and becomes a live eventWhether building infrastructure and orchestration across many models is now resilience rather than over-engineeringWhen the builders of AI also shape the rules that govern it, who represents the people using it🎙️ About the host Eva Simone Lihotzky, AI adoption and ethics advisor, formerly MD in one of the largest independent agency groups in Europe and co-author of 10 Moral Questions: How to Design Tech & AI Responsibly. She has spent more than a decade leading AI implementation inside organisations, which is why this episode resists the easy reads — it stays with the gray zone between hypocrisy and conviction, between capital and trust, rather than resolving it. This is a solo reflection: Eva connecting three news events into one question she openly admits is hard to narrow down. ⏱️ Chapters [00:00] Three news items, one thread[02:22] A frontier model offline in three days[08:00] Europe 2031: the window that closed early[11:30] Mistral, and the scale of the gap[18:45] The G7 table: builders meet the people who govern them[25:10] Who represents the ones using the technology🔗 Links Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/Europe 2031 agenda — https://europe2031.ai10 Moral Questions: How to Design Tech & AI Responsibly — https://www.10moralquestions.com/the-bookEva's World Economic Forum reflection, January 2026 — The politics of tech on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1RKtxdJWXcQH8vnpnDtgEP?si=wrln7peeSkKb-gotGHYMRgEva's World Economic Forum reflection, January 2026 — The politics of tech on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-in-between-tech-and-trust-podcast/id1828521905?l=en-GB&i=1000747143762Anthropic statement on the Fable / Mythos suspension — https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access

    Anthropic's Model Suspension, Europe 2031, and G7 World Leaders Lunching with Frontier AI Lab & Tech CEOs: The Week in Tech & Trust with Yours Truly (EP 29)

  5. Jun 11

    AI and The Cognitive Atrophy Trap: What Happens When We Let Tech Shortcut the Hard Parts of Learning - Tobias Burkhardt (EP 28)

    🎙️ Tobias Burkhardt, Founder of The Shift School AI, trust and learning are on a collision course, and the casualty is judgment. Tobias Burkhardt, founder of the Shiftschool, argues that the way individuals and organisations are adopting AI in learning is a cultural problem: the reflex to make learning faster and cheaper is precisely what makes AI dangerous to the people using it. This conversation is for anyone who suspects the upskilling programmes around them are solving for the wrong problem. 💡 Episode overview Tobias Burkhardt has spent years advising organisations on learning and organizational development, and his diagnosis is uncomfortable: cognitive atrophy is real, it is already happening, and it predates AI. The impulse to shortcut understanding — to reach for the tool before doing the thinking — is a cultural pattern that AI accelerates but did not create. In this conversation, he makes the case for treating AI as a relational technology rather than a productivity instrument, and for rebuilding learning around curation, community, and continuity rather than content delivery. He also names something most learning institutions will not: that the ultimate goal of good education is to make oneself obsolete. 🔑 Key themes Why treating AI as a tool rather than a collaborator is ill-advised, and what the alternative requiresThe faster-and-cheaper reflex in organisational learning, and why it compounds the problem it is meant to solveWhat a school without content actually means, and what takes content's placeThe bilateral responsibility in learning, and why self-discipline alone will never be sufficientTrust as an investment: why waiting for certainty before engaging with AI is the wrong posture🎤 About the guest Tobias Burkhardt is the founder of The Shiftschool, a learning institution he built because he loved learning and never liked schools. He advises organisations on learning strategies and has developed a philosophy of education built around what does not change — judgment, curation, social interaction, and continuity — rather than around the tools and content that do. His concept of a school without content is a practical response to the decreasing half-life of knowledge in an AI-native world. ⏱ Chapter markers [00:00] Can we trust ourselves to use AI — not just trust AI itself[04:00] Why the information abundance problem predates AI[08:30] From tool to collaborator to environment — how the relationship with AI evolves[11:00] Cognitive atrophy and the shortcutting reflex[18:30] Lifelong learning as personal obligation — and why institutions cannot wait[22:30] The school without content — what takes knowledge's place[30:00] Redesigning Shift School for an AI-native world 🔗 Links Tobias Burkhardt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meetropoly/ Eva Lihotzky on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/Visit the Shift School: https://shiftschool.deListen to the related episode with Simon Berkler on organisational AI adoption or trust in digital systems (EP 22): https://open.spotify.com/episode/6y8PMaVUnZVAR1hOAR15DN

    AI and The Cognitive Atrophy Trap: What Happens When We Let Tech Shortcut the Hard Parts of Learning - Tobias Burkhardt (EP 28)

  6. Jun 4

    Tech and Democracy: How Can Both Be Connected to Create Trust? with Nexus Politics (EP 27)

    🎙️ with Magnus Strobel, Co-Founder and CEO of Nexus Politics Trust in politics has been eroding across Western democracies for over a decade, and Magnus Strobel thinks the failure is in how democracy works, in the process that has stopped feeling participatory. His company, Nexus Politics, is a for-profit platform built to map the distance between what citizens actually think and what politicians actually do - and to make that distance impossible to ignore. 🔍 Episode overview This is a conversation about whether transparency can rebuild participation once the machinery of democracy has stopped feeling participatory. It is also about a quieter problem: how a founder building a trust instrument decides whether anyone actually trusts it. Magnus Strobel and his team create an architecture for a digital democracy platform: how citizen opinion gets routed to the right political actors, how the system maps public sentiment in real time, and where accountability is supposed to live. The harder questions arrive underneath: Why build this as for-profit rather than not-for-profit, and why that choice is the one that makes political neutrality credible. What politicians say they want from such a tool, and why their enthusiasm might mean less compared to how they use it specifically. It is a founder's conversation that keeps circling back to a single uncertainty: you can build the mechanism for trust, but you cannot yet prove the trust is there. ⚖️ Key themes Why the crisis is in how democracy functions, not in democracy itself - and what that distinction changes How a for-profit structure becomes the argument for political neutralityMapping the gap between what voters think and what politicians do What politicians actually want from civic tech, and why positive feedback is the hardest signal to trustTech as a tool that can repair democratic trust or deepen the damage, depending on who uses it and how 🤝 About the guest Magnus Strobel is co-founder of Nexus Politics, a digital democracy platform built to rebuild participation and accountability in representative democracies. His background is in behavioral economics, which surfaces throughout the conversation in his attention to the gap between what a system is designed to do and what people actually do with it. He builds from Munich, embedded in the local startup ecosystem, with a stated ambition modelled partly on Taiwan's experience of using participation tools to lift satisfaction with democracy. 🌍 Chapter markers [00:09] What comes to mind when a democracy founder thinks about trust[02:59] Opening the fragmented machinery of politics - participation, transparency, accountability[05:59] Why for-profit is the route to credible neutrality[16:08] The hardest part is always reality - and what politicians really want[22:49] Can tech rebuild democratic trust, or does it cut both ways[35:48] In-between moments: trust, division, and where a founder sits right now ⛓️‍💥 Links Nexus Politics:  www.nexuspolitics.orgMagnus Strobel LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/strobelmagnus/ Audrey Tang / Taiwan digital democracy: https://www.demnext.org/people/audrey-tangRebuild conference, Copenhagen: https://www.rebuild.net Related episode - Rebuilding Trust: Tech, Politics and Entrepreneurial Leadership (EP 06)

    Tech and Democracy: How Can Both Be Connected to Create Trust? with Nexus Politics (EP 27)

  7. May 28

    AI in China and in Europe: Trust, Differences, and Future Implications - Vincent Xiang, Founder China AI Connect (EP 26)

    Europe and China are on different AI paths at different speeds. Vincent Xiang has spent years inside that corridor: He has been working as a translator between Chinese AI founders and European investors and corporates, and this conversation dives into his experiences, conversations, and operations on the ground and in-between. 🧭 Episode overview European executives are excited about Chinese AI momentum. But they're also stuck before they act. Chinese founders interpret some of Europe's regulations as inefficiency. Both sides are operating with simplified labels that are accurate enough to feel right and wrong enough to produce bad decisions. Vincent walks through what he actually sees on the ground - why trust in China gets delegated to systems rather than built between strangers, why "AI superpower" and "surveillance dystopia" both miss the territory, why fragmentation is now treated as permanent reality by founders, and what European companies serious about engaging China should do before they book a single meeting. 🔍 Key themes discussed The different first questions Europe and China ask about new technology, and what each one produces downstreamTrust as delegated infrastructure - the Alipay escrow story and why people trust the system rather than the strangers in itWhy both Western labels for Chinese AI are wrong in the same direction, and what gets missed when leaders operate with themThe three-layer coordination of government, platforms, and institutions in China, and what its absence looks like in EuropeFragmentation as the new permanent reality, and why compliance has to be built in as a product feature from day one👤 About the guest Vincent Xiang is the founder of China AI Connect, a research and advisory practice helping European investors and corporates evaluate whether Chinese AI is relevant to their strategy, and helping Chinese founders understand the European market. He lived in Germany for seven years, writes the China AI Connect briefings on Chinese AI and deep-tech policy and players, and organises executive trips that bring European leaders to meet founders and operators on the ground. His vantage point is one of the few that sits genuinely between the two systems. ⏱️ Chapter markers [00:55] The first word that comes to mind: difference [05:00] People trust the system, not the strangers in it [12:01] Why "AI superpower" and "surveillance dystopia" both miss the territory [19:00] Three layers of coordination: government, platforms, institutions [22:30] Fragmentation as permanent reality, and compliance as a product feature [35:00] The robotics inflection and what favourable policy makes possible 🔗 Links Vincent Xiang on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/yxiangeclille/ China AI Connect on Substack - https://vincentxiang.substack.com AI 2030 / AI Plus initiative reference - https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/xw/zyjh/202509/t20250924_11715960.html Related episode - Episode on Trust as Geopolitical Requirement: Eva's WEF 2026 recap - https://open.spotify.com/episode/1RKtxdJWXcQH8vnpnDtgEP?si=u_MfnmOvQ2-AXSPRONX6Gw

    AI in China and in Europe: Trust, Differences, and Future Implications - Vincent Xiang, Founder China AI Connect (EP 26)

  8. May 21

    The Agentic AI Gap: When Tech is Used Before its Architecture is Ready - Anthony Alcaraz, Agentic AI Architect (EP 25)

    Most enterprises have the technology to run agentic AI. They do not yet have the data architecture, identity layer, or empowered workforce to actually trust it. Anthony Alcaraz argues that the bottleneck for agentic AI has shifted from building the agents to building everything around them — and that the organisations most at risk are the ones keeping a human in the loop and calling it transformation. This conversation is for leaders sitting between AI pilots that worked and production systems that have not yet arrived. 💡Episode overview Anthony joins Eva to map what changes when AI shifts from reactive systems to agents that observe, reason, and act. The conversation moves through what enterprises miss in their own data — systems of record that capture what happened but not why — and the new attack surfaces agents introduce, including tool poisoning. Anthony names the empowerment gap inside organisations: business experts who hold the knowledge agents need, with no clear path to building anything themselves. The most provocative moment lands near the end, when Anthony argues that human-in-the-loop adoption can be a way of avoiding actual transformation rather than achieving it. 🔍 Key themes discussed The shift from reactive to agentic systems, and what trust has to carry nowWhy most enterprise data is missing the why behind decisionsTool poisoning and the new attack surface for agentsThe empowerment gap between business knowledge and technical capabilityGraph architecture as the control layer for agentic reasoningWhy human-in-the-loop can be a refusal to transform👤 About the guest Anthony Alcaraz works across three vantage points that rarely sit together: he architects agentic AI systems, invests in early-stage AI startups as an angel, and is the author of Agentic Graph RAG with O'Reilly. He spends most weeks in conversation with founders attempting to enter regulated enterprises, and most evenings building software with the same tools he writes about. His perspective on this episode comes from watching the same gap repeat itself across organisations of very different sizes — the technology is ready, and most of the systems around it are not. 📍 Chapter markers [00:00] What changes when AI moves from reactive to agentic[05:42] Why agents need access — and what enterprises have not built[10:29] The three problems: data, governance, and the people in between[23:13] Graph architecture and the missing why of enterprise data[32:06] The empowerment gap that no one has solved yet[45:17] In-between: where Anthony finds himself now 🔗 Links Anthony Alcaraz LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-alcaraz-b80763155/ Agentic Graph RAG (O'Reilly) — https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/agentic-graphrag/9798341623163/ Foundation Capital context graph thesis — https://foundationcapital.com/ideas/the-case-for-context-graphs Related episode — Trust as an operating system in AI companions https://open.spotify.com/episode/5t4BtgevPOtMWUfB4jThWX?si=oGo2JPHNTeCTxbqkNXDJMwEva Simone Lihotzky's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/

    The Agentic AI Gap: When Tech is Used Before its Architecture is Ready - Anthony Alcaraz, Agentic AI Architect (EP 25)
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About

The podcast explores how we build, break, and rebuild trust in a world shaped by accelerating technology and artificial intelligence. Hosted by Eva Simone Lihotzky, AI adoption and ethics expert with 12+ years of experience in tech, the podcast creates in-depth conversations at the intersection of AI, business, ethics, and human connection. Through various lenses - across business, politics, neuroscience, tech and systems thinking in organizations - it hosts expert conversations for you to deep dives into one of the complex topics we need to solve as a society and beyond.

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