News & Insights on Pfisterer Consulting

AI coding agent costs more than the developer: the bill I pay myself

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 08:30:00 +0200

Sunday, 23:00. I let the content pipeline run a full end-to-end pass: research, two articles, two images, the slop gate. The box hums for a while, and when it stops I open the token dashboard and look at the number for that single run. Then I do the small, uncomfortable arithmetic anyone running an AI coding stack does sooner or later. If I ran this every day, the agent would stop being a tool and start being a second salary on my own credit card.

The ERP Clause Nobody Reads Decides the Ten-Year Cost

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 22:00:00 +0200

In 2017, a beverage group lost a court ruling over a single word in a contract signed in 2004. The word was “access”. Diageo had connected roughly 5,800 of its own staff to SAP through a Salesforce front end, assuming those people were Salesforce users. SAP read the old licence differently: anyone whose work touched the SAP system was a named SAP user, billable as such. The High Court in London agreed with SAP’s reading of the wording. The claim came to 54 million pounds (SAP UK Ltd v Diageo Great Britain Ltd, [2017] EWHC 189 (TCC), 16 February 2017).

The Autonomy Gap: Vendors Sell Autonomous, Operations Deliver Partial

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 11:00:00 +0200

The slide says “autonomous.” A procurement agent runs the buying process end to end, no human in the loop, a clean arrow from order to confirmation. The board likes the slide. It approves the project.

Then the system goes live. The agent drafts the order confirmation, flags the exception, and waits. A buyer reviews the edge cases. The standard volume flows through untouched; the deviations land on a desk. That is not the slide the board signed off on, but something better that almost nobody budgeted for.

AI Tokenomics: Why Your AI Budget Has No Ceiling Anymore

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 19:00:00 +0200

A finance director at a machine builder with 1,200 staff opens the first Copilot Cowork invoice issued after 16 June 2026. The seat licence sits where it always has, line by line, name by name. Underneath it is a second line that was not there last month: usage, measured in credits, carrying a number nobody on the team had forecast. He signed the contract in spring. He learned what a heavy task actually costs in the third billing month. Between those two moments lies the gap this article is about.

Your AI Agent Has No Permission Profile. It Has Your Intern's.

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0200

Tuesday, 9:14 in the morning. Over the weekend, Copilot Cowork went live across the company’s Microsoft 365 tenant — Microsoft shipped it on 17 June 2026. The IT lead finds out from a teammate, not from a rollout plan. Nobody in the building decided which mailboxes, drives, and calendars the agent is allowed to see.

So it sees all of them, not because anyone granted it access, but because nobody fenced it in. The platform default grants the agent everything the person who started it is allowed to touch. Most companies in the Mittelstand, the German mid-market backbone of family-owned firms, discover that the hard way, after go-live.

When the AI Subscription Becomes a Bet: A Procurement Lesson

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0200

A controller at a German machine builder signs off on a 200-dollar monthly AI subscription. It is the tool the engineering team now uses to write quotation logic, and it costs less than a single contractor day. Five hours into a Monday coding session, the team hits a wall: roughly 15 percent of the weekly allowance is gone. That figure comes from the plaintiff in a lawsuit, not from an audited log. But the question it raises lands on the controller’s desk anyway. How do you budget for a cost line that nobody can convert into work units in advance?

Data Act Access by Design: The ERP Question Hiding Behind the IoT Label

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0200

A machine builder in the Hunsrück region is three months out from launching a new generation of connected equipment. The production schedule is set, the first units ship in the autumn, and the control-system supplier has already answered the compliance question in one sentence: “Access by design? We will do that on the PLC.” Everyone in the room nods, because it sounds like a firmware setting and firmware is the supplier’s department.

Fable 5's 14-day window: how to budget AI when the vendor moves the price

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0200

Tuesday, 9 June 2026, shortly after nine in the morning. The CTO of a 240-employee components manufacturer near Stuttgart reads the announcement that every AI newsletter will quote by lunchtime: Claude Fable 5, Anthropic’s strongest model to date, is included in Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise plans at no extra cost. By ten, four threads in his engineering channel propose moving the quoting assistant, the tender-analysis pipeline and the support triage onto the new model. The date that matters sits further down in the same announcement. On 23 June, Fable 5 leaves those plans again. What exactly would his team be building on for those two weeks, and who decides what it costs to keep?

LinkedIn AI Sludge in 2026: Bubble or Your Best Moat?

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:00:00 +0200

A Sunday evening in early June. I am scrolling my LinkedIn feed with a coffee gone cold next to the keyboard, and I start counting. Seven posts in a row, all built the same way. One bold opening line, three bullet points, a rhetorical closing question. Swap the names and the photos and you could shuffle them into any order without losing a thing.

So I asked myself the question I had been avoiding for months. Does this channel still produce business, or have I been writing into a cloud of hot air? I closed the feed, opened my own analytics, and the answer was less comfortable than I expected.

The Inference Gap: Why the 'AI Bank' Collides with CJEU C-184/20

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:30:00 +0200

Late last week, on a public LinkedIn thread about the “AI bank”, a board member of a German direct bank used a phrase that stuck with me: a new species of bank is forming, one that fuses online-banking prices with branch-grade advice through AI. The thread was lively, the optimism genuine. So I asked a narrow question. Where in this architecture do you classify data from which special categories under Article 9 GDPR can be inferred, in the sense of the Court of Justice ruling C-184/20? The bank answered honestly, and the answer is the reason for this article: that point had “not been addressed explicitly at the legal-operational level.”

SAP's 9 June API Cut-Off: One Pipeline Dies, Not All of Them

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0200

A data engineer at a German machine builder opens the orchestration log on a Monday morning and stares at a job that has run, untouched, for two years. Every night it pulls S/4HANA finance data into a Microsoft Fabric pipeline through the Azure Data Factory connector. Green checkmarks all the way down. On his second screen sits an internal memo with a single line highlighted in yellow: “SAP API enforcement, 9 June.” He knows the date is real. What he does not know, what nobody in the building can answer in the next ten minutes, is whether that nightly job runs over ODP through RFC, or over something else entirely.

ChatGPT Finances: The Architecture Question Before the Trust Question

Thu, 28 May 2026 10:30:00 +0200

15 May 2026, late afternoon Pacific Time. OpenAI ships “Finances in ChatGPT” to U.S. Pro subscribers. Through Plaid, users can connect accounts at more than 12,000 institutions, including Bank of America, Chase, Robinhood, Schwab, and Fidelity. Read-only access, no transactional actions, encrypted API, optional multi-factor authentication. Greg Brockman celebrates the feature on X. OpenAI cites a number: more than 200 million users already ask ChatGPT financial questions every month. A few hours later, Rachel Tobac, CEO of San Francisco-based security firm SocialProof Security, posts on LinkedIn: “Please don’t make it easy for me to steal your life savings.”

Germany's E-Invoice 2027: the 12-point readiness check for the Mittelstand

Wed, 27 May 2026 11:30:00 +0200

April 2026, month-end close at a mid-size German machinery manufacturer. The CFO calls. Eight input-VAT reversals in the first quarter alone. One of his suppliers has been sending invoices labelled “E-invoice” in the header since January — all of them PDFs without embedded XML. The accounting team typed them in manually, as always. At the VAT reconciliation, they failed: the German Ministry of Finance letter from 25 October 2025 makes it explicit that a PDF without EN 16931-conformant XML is not an e-invoice in the VAT sense — and the input VAT deduction is denied if the supplier is already subject to the mandate.

From pizza dough to consulting: why make-or-buy is a craft question

Tue, 26 May 2026 10:00:00 +0200

Saturday evening. I am kneading pizza dough. Again. Three days of cold fermentation in the fridge, 65 percent hydration. A flour mix of durum with a touch of Manitoba. The twenty-fifth time this year.

The first time, ten years ago, was frustrating. The dough refused to develop, the crust turned into cake. By the hundredth attempt I could tell from the steam above the pan whether the stone had reached 380 degrees or was still at 320.

My LinkedIn strategy as code: building a multi-agent content pipeline

Tue, 19 May 2026 15:00:00 +0200

Last Sunday, 22:00. On my desk are eleven Markdown files, next to them an open spreadsheet with 90 days of LinkedIn analytics. Cold mate in the glass, an honest question in the back of my head about why I am building a pipeline rather than writing the next post.

The spreadsheet gives a clear answer. My profile has 511 followers and delivered 44,483 impressions over the last 90 days at an engagement rate of 0.18 percent, a factor of 11 to 16 below the LinkedIn benchmark of two to three percent. On 52 of those 90 days the feed stayed entirely silent, without a single reaction to any of my posts.

The Weaker System Won: What a 12-Week M&A Integration Teaches About ERP Selection

Mon, 18 May 2026 07:00:00 +0200

Friday 18:00. 80 employees log out of their old ERP. Monday 08:00. The same 80 log into the new one.

The new one is objectively weaker.

Context: M&A integration. In 2025, an international corporation acquired an 80-person Mittelstand firm from professional services. Requirement: all systems and data into the corporate IT estate. Over a single weekend. No business interruption.

The corporate ERP could do less than the one it replaced. Different cost accounting, different reports, two incompatible data models. It still had to run.

Six Hours, Eighteen Years: What NGINX Rift Tells the Mittelstand

Fri, 15 May 2026 07:00:00 +0200

On May 13, 2026, F5 and security researcher depthfirst publish a disclosure with weight behind it. CVE-2026-42945, codenamed NGINX Rift, CVSS 9.2. Unauthenticated remote code execution in the ngx_http_rewrite_module of NGINX. Affected: all open-source versions from 0.6.27 through 1.30.0 and NGINX Plus R32 through R36. The bug has been in the code since 2008. Eighteen years.

The actual punchline sits in the disclosure footnote. The bug was not found by a human researcher. It was found by an autonomous AI analysis system. Six hours of runtime against one of the most thoroughly reviewed open-source codebases on the planet. This is the direct confirmation of the thesis I sketched on May 13 in the article on the Mythos Glasswing asymmetry as something coming. It arrived a week later.

The Glasswing Asymmetry: What Mythos Finds in Firefox and What the Mittelstand Should Learn

Wed, 13 May 2026 07:00:00 +0200

On May 5, 2026, Mozilla publishes an unusually candid blogpost: An early version of Anthropic’s newest model, Claude Mythos Preview, has found 271 security vulnerabilities in Firefox over the past weeks. 180 high-severity, 80 moderate, 11 low. Some of the bugs sat undiscovered in the code for 15 years, meaning since 2011. Patches went out in Firefox 149.0.2, 150, 150.0.1, and 150.0.2.

That alone would be a substantial story. What makes it matter for the German Mittelstand is the footnote: Mythos is not publicly available. Anthropic currently hands the model only to eleven organizations under a program called Project Glasswing. The list contains U.S. hyperscalers, U.S. banks, U.S. security vendors, and the Linux Foundation. No German company. No European company outside Linux.

Nine Seconds to Data Loss: What the PocketOS Crash Teaches German Mittelstand

Mon, 04 May 2026 10:00:00 +0200

Thursday, April 24, 2026, late evening in Utah. Jer Crane, founder of the U.S. SaaS company PocketOS, has his Cursor agent running. A routine pass through staging, powered by Claude Opus 4.6. What happens next has shown up in nearly every AI-risk talk this year: the agent deletes the entire production database in nine seconds. Backups included.

PocketOS makes software for car rental companies. Reservations, payments, customer records, vehicle tracking. Three months of data were gone. Customers showing up Friday morning to pick up a rental car found no booking in the system. Crane spent hours reconstructing reservations from Stripe payment histories, calendar integrations, and email confirmations.

Mid-Market ERP 2026: Four Reports, One Uncomfortable Pattern

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0200

The CFO of a mechanical engineering firm from the Sauerland drops a stack of reports on the table. On top is the DSAG Investment Report, then the Trovarit user study, then a printed Bitkom chart. At the bottom lies an email from Microsoft about the new Dynamics 365 pricing. Across from him sits the IT lead with a green folder of proposals: SAP Private Edition, Dynamics 365 Business Central, plus a NetSuite pitch from last week. Four data sources, three ERP options, one question that only hangs quietly in the room: who reads these reports from the user’s perspective, rather than the vendor’s?

The Burrito That Wrote Python: What Chipotle's Chatbot Taught German Mittelstand

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 11:15:00 +0200

Lunch break, 12:47. A developer is hungry. He opens the Chipotle app on his iPhone, taps into the support chat window, and asks the one question that should never belong there: “How do I reverse a linked list in Python?”

He expects what any support bot returns: “Sorry, I can only answer questions about your order.” Instead, Pepper, the bot behind that little chat window, comes back with a clean iterative solution, adds a runtime note, and then asks politely: “What would you like for lunch?”

Claude Opus 4.6 Performance Decline: What Businesses Must Learn

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0200

Your ERP vendor swaps out the database backend overnight. The interface looks the same, but queries take twice as long and reports come back with gaps. No changelog, no announcement. That is exactly what is happening right now with Anthropic’s flagship model Claude Opus 4.6 – and it affects everyone running AI-assisted development or automation in production. This topic falls squarely into my AI & Automation consulting for mid-sized companies.

Thinking Depth in Freefall: The Performance Data on Claude Opus 4.6

On April 2, 2026, Stella Laurenzo, Senior Director AI at AMD, published a detailed analysis on GitHub Issue #42796. Not opinion – data: 6,852 sessions, 234,760 tool calls, 17,871 thinking blocks. The results are clear.

WhatsApp Lawsuit Against Meta: What It Means for Businesses

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:30:00 +0200

For ten years, WhatsApp has promised end-to-end encryption. Since January 2026, a class action lawsuit in a U.S. federal court claims that promise was a lie. And today, April 10, 2026, the public debate is escalating. Elon Musk and Telegram founder Pavel Durov are attacking Meta head-on.

This directly affects German SMEs. Millions of businesses use WhatsApp Business for customer communication, order processing, scheduling, and internal coordination. If the allegations hold up, trade secrets and GDPR compliance are at stake for every one of them. This topic falls squarely within the IT strategy and system selection work I do with mid-sized companies.

Context Rot in AI Agents: Why Quality Degrades

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:30:00 +0200

Anyone who works with Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot knows the pattern. The problem has a name: Context Rot. The first results are sharp and the architecture holds up. Then quality drops off. After 20, 30 minutes, the answers start repeating themselves. The AI agent loses context. It produces code that contradicts what it wrote five prompts ago.

Not a user error – an architecture problem. The solution lies in context engineering: the deliberate management of context windows through multi-agent orchestration. These are exactly the kinds of real-world problems I address in my AI & Automation consulting.

5 Modules That Don't Belong in Your ERP: Why Suite Thinking Ruins Your Procurement

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:15:00 +0100

Five departments sit at the table. Each one has a wish list. HR wants skill management. Sales needs lead scoring. Administration demands compliant document archiving. The project manager insists on Kanban boards. The quality manager wants audit management with CAPA tracking. All five wishes end up in the same document: the ERP requirements catalogue. All classified as knockout criteria.

The result is something I see in tender after tender: a catalogue with 177 criteria, 131 of them classified as A-criteria — mandatory knockout requirements. That’s 74 percent, far above any reasonable benchmark. What starts as structured procurement ends as a wish concert that no single system can serve.

AI as a Knockout Criterion in ERP Tenders: Why SMEs Are Getting It Wrong

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0100

It sounds like a forward-thinking decision: a mid-sized company adds AI-powered forecasting and intelligent automation as a hard knockout criterion to its ERP requirements specification. After all, the new system shouldn’t be outdated before it’s even implemented.

I see this regularly in tenders that cross my desk. And every time, I say the same thing: This is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make in ERP selection. This is a central aspect of my ERP consulting for SMEs.

Omnichannel Without Limits: Why Your ERP Becomes a Digital Team

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:15:00 +0000

Omnichannel is the gold standard: Instagram purchases, in-store pickup, chatbot-driven returns — all seamlessly connected. But in practice, many SMEs already struggle with the basics: a stable multichannel setup. Scale to Amazon, Kaufland, or TikTok Shop, and you’ll quickly discover: The problem isn’t demand — it’s the operational complexity behind the scenes. This topic is part of my ERP consulting for SMEs.

Commerce in 2026 doesn’t forgive rigidity. Marketplaces dictate the rules, algorithms change overnight, and customers expect the same availability across every channel. If you’re still managing this manually, you’re losing — not because your product is bad, but because your infrastructure can’t keep up.

When AI Agents Hack AI Systems: Why Your AI Needs Security Testing Now

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0100

An autonomous AI agent chains four individually harmless vulnerabilities into a complete platform takeover — severity rating CVSS 9.8 out of 10. Then it gives itself a voice and calls the target system’s AI. No human hacker. No sophisticated exploit kit. One AI hacking another AI.

This isn’t science fiction. This happened in March 2026 — to a $20 million-funded AI recruiting startup whose clients included Anthropic, Stripe, and Monzo. AI security is a central aspect of my consulting on compliance and regulatory requirements.

Digitalization in Mid-Sized Companies: If You Can't Do Controlling, You Don't Need AI

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0100

Nearly half of mid-sized companies don’t do their own controlling. No contribution margins per customer. No cost center analysis. No reliable margin per order. In the same breath, the next statistic – confirmed by Bitkom surveys: Nearly as many plan to deploy AI.

That’s not a contradiction. It’s a pattern — and I see it in almost every consulting project.

Companies skip stages 1, 2, and 3 of digitalization — and want to jump straight to stage 7. I offer this maturity assessment as part of my ERP consulting for SMEs.

AI in Mid-Sized Companies: Without ERP Integration, Your AI Assistant Is an Expensive Toy

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0100

22% of property managers already use AI. At the VDIV Forum Zukunft in March 2026, that sounded like progress. Until someone asked the decisive question: Can the AI phone assistant access tenant master data in the ERP system?

The answer: No. The assistant takes calls, formulates friendly responses — but knows neither contract terms nor account balances nor open tickets. It’s friendly, fast, and clueless.

This isn’t a property management problem. It’s a mid-market problem. These integration questions are exactly what I address in my AI and automation consulting for SMEs.

ERP Selection in Mid-Sized Companies: Why the Requirements Document Is the Most Expensive Mistake

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0100

The most thorough company I accompanied through an ERP selection chose the worst vendor. 200 pages of requirements. 6 months to write. 14 vendors contacted, 8 invited, 4 shortlisted. A process that any project management professor would have applauded.

The result: A system that perfectly fits the old processes — not the future ones. An implementation partner who impressed in the demo but was overwhelmed in execution. And a go-live that came 14 months later than planned.

Digitalization in Mid-Sized Companies: Why the IT Department Is the Wrong Project Leader

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0100

“IT handles the ERP project.” This sentence comes up in almost every mid-sized company when it’s about an ERP migration, DATEV automation, or CRM project. Sounds logical — it’s about software. So it’s an IT topic.

That’s exactly the mistake. ERP, CRM, DATEV integration — these aren’t IT projects. They’re organizational projects with a technical component. This understanding is a core part of my ERP consulting for SMEs. When IT leads, discussions revolve around interfaces instead of business processes. Servers instead of workflows. Licenses instead of value creation.

ERP Frustration in Mid-Sized Companies: Why a New System Won't Fix the Old Problem

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0100

“Our ERP is the problem.” I hear this sentence in almost every initial meeting. Too slow. Too complicated. Can’t do this. Does that wrong. The solution seems obvious: a new system. More modern, more powerful, better.

In 8 out of 10 cases, the truth is different – and this aligns with findings from the Standish Group, which has analyzed IT project failures for decades: The ERP isn’t the problem. The processes are. And a new system with the same processes delivers exactly the same result — just at a higher cost. This is a core focus of my ERP consulting for SMEs.

Inside OpenClaw #5: Production-Ready AI on WSL2

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0100

Your inference server runs fine on Friday afternoon. You set the right vLLM flags, tool calling works, the agent responds correctly. Monday morning, the server is dead. No crash log. No error message. WSL2 simply stopped running.

This is the gap between “works on my machine” and “runs in production.” And it has nothing to do with code. Production stability of AI systems is an aspect of my AI and automation consulting.

Data Quality in Mid-Sized Companies: Why Projects Fail in Preparation, Not Execution

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0100

“First we need to clean up the data, then we can start the project.” No sentence is more common in steering committees. And no sentence has delayed or quietly killed more projects.

The pattern is always the same — whether it’s an ERP migration, a DATEV integration project, a CRM campaign, or an AI pilot. It is a central theme in my ERP consulting for SMEs. Data quality becomes a precondition. Months are spent cleansing, harmonizing, structuring. Budgets flow. And the actual project never starts.

DATEV ERP: Why You Should Never Change Cost Centers Mid-Year

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 14:00:00 +0100

“We just created a new department — can we quickly adjust the cost centers?” This request comes up in almost every company at least once a year. Usually in April, when the new org structure is in place. Or in September, when a new project starts. The answer should always be the same: Not now. At year-end.

Why? Because DATEV handles cost centers differently than most users assume. These DATEV-ERP topics are a central part of my consulting on compliance and regulatory requirements. And the consequences of a mid-year change only become visible when it’s too late — in the management report, the cost center analysis, or the annual financial statements.

Inside OpenClaw #4: Why AI Agents Need a Personality

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0100

Ask a bare language model the same question twice, and you’ll get two different personalities. One response is formal and thorough, the next is casual and terse. There’s no consistency, no sense of role, no memory of what it’s supposed to be.

For experimentation, that’s fine. For production use in a business, it’s a dealbreaker — which is exactly why configuration is a central aspect of my AI and automation consulting. When your AI agent behaves differently every session, users lose trust — and they lose it fast.

Inside OpenClaw #3: Why We Replaced Our AI Model — and Need 6x Less Memory

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 07:00:00 +0100

A Model That Changes the Rules

Model changes like this and their implications feed directly into my AI and automation consulting. Our previous setup was solid: Mistral Small 24B on vLLM, AWQ-quantized, the right flags configured, tool calling working reliably. But two limits remained: 32,000 tokens of context and 14 GB of VRAM consumed by model weights alone — on a GPU with 24 GB total.

Then Qwen3.5-35B-A3B appeared. A model that sounds impossible on paper: 35 billion parameters, but only 3 billion active at any given time. A 262,000-token context window. And faster than our previous, smaller model.

Inside OpenClaw #2: The Hidden vLLM Flags for Mistral

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0100

Running a Mistral model on vLLM should be simple. Load the model, start the server, send requests. And for basic text generation, it is. But the moment you need tool calling — the backbone of any AI agent — things start breaking in ways that are surprisingly hard to diagnose. Technical details like these are part of my AI and automation consulting.

The Silent Failures

When vLLM’s tool-calling configuration is wrong, it doesn’t throw an error. Instead, you get one of these failure modes:

Inside OpenClaw #1: Web Search Without Hallucination

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0100

Ask a local LLM to search the web, and something interesting happens: it doesn’t tell you it can’t. Instead, it confidently generates search results — complete with URLs, snippets, and source attributions. The problem? They’re entirely made up.

This isn’t a minor nuisance. For an AI agent that’s supposed to retrieve real information, fabricated sources are a critical failure mode. I address challenges like these in my AI and automation consulting. And it’s one of the hardest problems to solve when building on local models.

Zero API Costs: How We Run an AI Agent on a Single GPU

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 16:00:00 +0100

Most AI agents depend on cloud APIs — and every request costs money. With agent workloads, those costs add up fast: a single complex task can consume 50,000 to 100,000 tokens. Run that a few dozen times a day, and you’re looking at a serious monthly bill.

We took a different approach with OpenClaw. Our AI agent runs entirely on local hardware — one GPU, no cloud dependency, no recurring API fees. Local AI solutions are a focus of my AI and automation consulting.

Cloud Exit for SMEs: Why Companies Are Bringing Their ERP Systems Back

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0100

For five years, the message was clear: if you don’t move to the cloud, you’ll be left behind. The Bitkom Cloud Monitor confirmed rising adoption numbers year after year. Analysts, consultants, software vendors – everyone preached the same direction. On-premise was the legacy model. Anyone still running SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, or an industry-specific ERP on their own infrastructure was either brave or behind the times.

Now the mood is shifting. Not loudly, not on conference stages. But in the meeting rooms of IT leaders. The question is no longer “When do we move to the cloud?” – it’s: “Is it still worth it?” This strategic assessment is a core topic in my ERP consulting for SMEs.

One Year of Mandatory E-Invoicing: Why the B2B Standard Is Drowning in ZUGFeRD Chaos

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:00:00 +0100

Note: This article covers the German e-invoicing mandate (E-Rechnungspflicht). The requirements are specific to companies operating in Germany.

Earlier this year, I published a summary of what SMEs need to know about mandatory e-invoicing. Reception mandate since January 2025, sending mandate from 2027, EN 16931 formats. Straightforward enough in theory.

Now, more than a year after the reception mandate took effect, it’s time for an honest assessment: The reality on the ground is catastrophic. E-invoicing is one of the most pressing topics in my consulting on compliance and regulatory requirements.

A2A Instead of B2B: When Your Buyer's AI Negotiates with the Supplier's AI

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:00:00 +0100

Monday Morning, 8:00 AM — and the Purchase Order Is Already Waiting

Imagine this: Your ERP system detects that a raw material is running low. Overnight, an AI agent contacts three supplier agents, compares offers on price, delivery time, and contract terms, and prepares a purchase order — ready for human approval when you arrive at your desk.

No phone calls. No email ping-pong. No manual spreadsheet comparisons. Just a clean recommendation backed by data.

Shadow AI: When Employees Secretly Build Their Own AI Agents

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0100

The New Shadow IT Has a Brain

Shadow IT has been a headache for years — unauthorized tools, private cloud accounts, rogue SaaS subscriptions. But Shadow AI takes it to a different level entirely. This topic is part of my AI and automation consulting for SMEs. Because this time, employees aren’t just using unapproved software. They’re building intelligent workflows that actively process, analyze, and redistribute company data.

And they’re doing it with the best of intentions.

OpenClaw: How We Got Three AI Agents to Debate Each Other

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 14:00:00 +0100

In the first article about OpenClaw, we covered the basic idea: an AI assistant that runs on your own hardware and is controllable via WhatsApp. Since then, we’ve been experimenting further — and built something that shows where AI automation is actually heading. Experiments like these feed directly into my AI and automation consulting.

We got three AI agents to debate each other in separate terminal sessions — until they agreed on a solution.

Helsing, AI Weapons, and the Illusion of Human in the Loop

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0100

Helsing is one of Europe’s fastest-growing defense companies. Founded in Munich, with offices in London and Paris, the company builds AI-powered weapon systems: the HX-2 strike drone, the CA-1 Europa autonomous combat aircraft (with HENSOLDT), electronic warfare (Cirra), underwater reconnaissance (SG-1). Investors like Daniel Ek (Spotify founder) and former Airbus CEO Tom Enders sit on the board.

This is not a startup toy. Helsing is a heavy player in European defense.

AI Agents and the EU AI Act 2026: What SMEs Need to Know Now

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0100

August 2, 2026 is the deadline: the EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) takes full effect. For German SMEs, this creates a dilemma: if you use AI, you must prove it’s compliant. If you don’t use AI, you lose the race for talent and efficiency.

I’m currently working intensively on exactly this topic – and sharing my assessment here. The EU AI Act is a central topic in my consulting on compliance and regulatory requirements.

Website Relaunch with AI Instead of an Agency: What Used to Cost €15,000 Now Takes 2 Days

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0100

In early February 2026, I faced a decision: my website needed a relaunch. New design, better structure, more professional presentation. The classic route would have been: brief an agency, collect quotes, wait 4–8 weeks, invest €10,000–20,000.

I chose a different path. And this article describes honestly how it went. It is a practical example of my AI and automation consulting – only this time for myself.

The Tech Stack: Hugo, Claude, and OpenCode

Hugo – the Static Site Generator

Hugo is an open-source framework that generates websites from Markdown files. No database, no WordPress, no PHP. Just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript – lightning fast, secure, and easy to host.

OpenClaw: The Personal AI Assistant That Siri Should Have Been

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:00:00 +0100

For years, the tech industry has been promising us the perfect personal assistant. Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant — all disappointing the moment requirements go beyond “set a timer.” Now there’s an open-source project that actually delivers on that promise: OpenClaw. Evaluating solutions like these is part of my AI and automation consulting.

What Is OpenClaw?

OpenClaw is an AI assistant that runs on your own computer (or server) — not in a tech giant’s cloud. You communicate with it via WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, or iMessage — exactly where you’re already writing all day.

E-Invoicing 2025: What SMEs Need to Know Now

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0100

Note: This article covers German e-invoicing regulations (Wachstumschancengesetz). The requirements are specific to companies operating in Germany.

Since January 1, 2025, companies in the B2B sector must be able to receive e-invoices. The e-invoicing mandate is a core topic in my consulting on compliance and regulatory requirements for SMEs. Starting 2027, sending e-invoices will also be mandatory (with a transition period until 2028 for smaller companies).

E-Invoice Definition: What Qualifies Under German Law

A PDF via email is not an e-invoice. Germany’s Wachstumschancengesetz (Growth Opportunities Act) defines e-invoices as structured electronic formats compliant with EN 16931. In practice, that means:

AI in SMEs: Where It Actually Helps — and Where It Doesn't

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0100

Every other conference agenda features “AI transformation.” Every third LinkedIn post promises 10x productivity through GPT. Meanwhile, most mid-market business owners are asking: Where do I start — and is it even worth it?

A sober assessment — grounded in hands-on experience and findings from the Bitkom AI Monitor. This pragmatic assessment is part of my AI and automation consulting for SMEs.

AI Use Cases in SMEs: Documents, Knowledge, and Reporting

Document Processing

Invoices, delivery notes, contracts — this is where AI delivers measurable time savings. OCR combined with language models can classify unstructured documents, extract data, and feed it into ERP systems. Typical savings: 60–80% of manual processing time.

ERP Migration: 5 Mistakes That Make Projects Fail

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0100

After over a decade of ERP projects, I keep seeing the same patterns. Technology is rarely the problem. Projects fail because of organization, expectations, and communication. These experiences form the foundation of my ERP consulting for SMEs.

Mistake 1: No Dedicated Project Manager on the Client Side

The ERP project is managed “on the side” by the IT director or CFO. Both already have a full-time job. The project gets whatever attention is left over — which is never enough.