About

I’m Thilo Horstmann, a technologist based in Hamburg. I have worked with artificial intelligence for more than 30 years, from research labs to the executive floor. My key area of work today is agentic workflows: AI agents that reason in multiple steps, orchestrate processes, and work with an organization’s tools, APIs, and knowledge. My focus topics are security, data sovereignty, and open source: AI that organizations control, with open models and tools as my preferred option wherever they fit.

What I do

Since 2024 I have worked as an independent consultant, designing and building end-to-end AI solutions, from strategy to production software. I offer two kinds of services:

• AI for your organization: strategy, agentic AI, and secure, sovereign AI infrastructure
• Software built with AI agents: software I develop faster and at lower cost, using AI agents as my tools

Examples of my work, from AI for a call center operator and a consultancy to my own open-source chess engine, are on the projects page.

Career

Most recently I was Vice President and CTO of the Costa Group (AIDA Cruises and Costa Cruises), where I led innovation and large digitalization projects including the roll-out of Starlink to our fleet. Before that, as Director Technology at AIDA Cruises, I led the engineering teams and built a Kubernetes-based platform for guest and crew applications on shore and on board.

At Thoughtworks I worked as a principal consultant on digital transformation projects for clients such as Porsche and Daimler. Before that I ran my own company: I built one of the first mobile Twitter clients called twibble, used among others by Queen Rania of Jordan (TechCrunch). Later I co-founded Herolabs, which created a social gaming platform using real-time football data. Earlier I held product management and director roles at SAP and Bertelsmann.

Background

I come from research: I wrote my master’s thesis in AI at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), and in 1991, while still a student and long before agentic computing became mainstream, co-authored a paper on “the emancipation of machine agents”. My PhD at Fraunhofer FIT was on the web: I co-developed the BSCW shared workspace system, which also took me to the newly formed World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as a research fellow.

Zeitenwende is German for a turning point in history. I believe AI is one, and this site is about making the most of it.

Contact

Write to . My full CV is on LinkedIn.