Who runs the company when the AI agents do the work?

About this event

ESMT Insight Hour with Dr. Martin Hofmann

The question is no longer whether AI will transform organizations. The question is how you design a company where humans and autonomous agents work side by side. The stakes are high: firms that fail to get the balance right risk losing control, trust, and competitive advantage as work becomes increasingly agentic.

The core challenge? Design hybrid teams, governance, and leadership so agents can carry workload while experts carry judgment, and the organization learns continuously from both.

In this ESMT Insight Hour, Dr. Martin Hofmann, author of The Agentic Enterprise, will present insights from his new book and introduce a new business operating model built around hybrid teams of domain experts and AI agents that sense, decide, learn, and act autonomously. Drawing on the Agentic Enterprise Framework™, he will show how enterprises move beyond automation into true autonomy and why trust becomes the organization’s new operating system.

You’ll gain insight into:

• How to architect hybrid teams of humans and AI agents, and the roles each should play
• Why trust, rather than rules, must become the organization’s operating system
• Practical leadership, governance, and scaling strategies for agentic organizations

Join us to find out what it really takes to lead, scale, and orchestrate intelligence in the era of autonomous agents.

Moderated by Catalina Stefanescu-Cuntze, Professor of Management Science and Faculty Lead, Master in Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, ESMT Berlin.

About the speaker

Martin Hofmann is a senior business technology executive with a PhD in industrial engineering from ETH Zurich and a master’s degree in business computer science from the University of Mannheim.

He began his career at EDS and later held leadership roles at Volkswagen AG, where he served as group CIO and led the VW Group’s end-to-end cloud transformation. He founded technology and software hubs worldwide and established VW’s Data Lab in Munich, focused on applied AI and quantum computing.

In 2020, Dr. Hofmann joined Salesforce as senior vice president, Strategic Customer Transformation & Innovation. In 2023, he served as chief technology and information officer at Volta Trucks, where he led the architecture and delivery of vehicle, customer, and enterprise systems built on AI, mobile, and edge computing.

Today, he advises corporate leaders on enterprise transformation, invests as an angel investor and board member in deep-tech startups, and is the founder of Novagentica AG. He is also the publisher of his book, The agentic enterprise: Building organizations that think, act, and learn autonomously.

About the moderator

Catalina Stefanescu-Cuntze is professor of management science and faculty lead of the Master in Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (MAAI) at ESMT Berlin. She joined ESMT in November 2009 as an associate professor, became the first holder of the Deutsche Post DHL Chair, and has served as both director of research and dean of faculty. Prior to joining ESMT, she was assistant professor of decision sciences at London Business School.

Prof. Dr. Stefanescu-Cuntze received her PhD and MS in operations research from Cornell University and holds a BS in mathematics from the University of Bucharest. Her work focuses on analytics and AI for managerial decision making, with expertise in forecasting, revenue management, and credit and financial risk modeling. She teaches in MBA, EMBA, MSc, and executive education programs.