GenAI Wednesday: Max Koennings "Building an AI-First Company"

AI isn’t a feature. It’s the new operating system for companies.
In this talk, Max Koennings (CPO & Co-Founder of Mindfuel) breaks down what “AI-first” truly means—beyond hype, beyond benchmarks, deep into mindset, execution, and transformation.

If you lead AI, build AI, or shape products, this talk shows the shift already underway:
• why enterprises fail to extract value
• how agents reshape product, engineering, and operations
• what user behavior changes already mean for your business
• and why AI will define the next decade of winners and laggards

This is not a model demo. It’s a blueprint for building the future.

00:00 Opening & Expectations
01:56 Who is Max? Founding story.
03:07 Effectuation & entrepreneurship principles.
05:31 Early failures & the hard pivot.
07:03 Three problems in enterprise AI.
08:56 The Thermomix insight story.
10:55 Towards an AI & data impact platform.
11:53 Agenda for today.

Why AI-First Matters
12:46 Why AI-first matters & will win.
14:11 AI-first vs. AI-native companies.
17:04 “Change or be changed.”

Mindset: Learning from Mobile-First
19:10 Mobile-first as the lesson for AI-first.
20:14 How Thermomix moved into a digital era.
23:12 Learning from the past to shape the future.
23:26 Google’s agentic checkout.
24:38 ChatGPT/Atlas flight-booking story.

AI-First Company Operations
26:31 Inside Mindfuel: insights automation.
27:59 AI in product development.
29:58 Coding with agents: reality check.
31:30 When model updates break prompts.
32:22 Automated release notes.

AI-First Product (Delight)
33:03 The Value Agent.
34:14 Enterprise AI compliance challenges.
34:58 The Discovery Agent.
35:53 The future CDO experience.

Closing
36:38 Where we really are on the curve.
37:24 Summary & call to action.
39:12 Ending.

Thanks to CompuSafe Data Systems and jambit for supporting this event.