25+ Years Executive Experience
Board Member & Advisor
4 Continents
Global Data & AI Leader at Capgemini
Frank Gundlich
I started as a software developer in Germany — no university degree, just a vocational diploma and a restless need to understand how systems actually work. Twenty-five years and four continents later, I built the first global big data platform at BASF, led one of the world's largest SAP Data & AI practices at Capgemini, served on a supervisory board, and wrote business fiction about the decisions leaders make and avoid. I follow problems, not titles.
The gap is not the technology
Most AI programs are already funded. Very few are governed.
Every organisation has declared itself an AI organisation. Few have prepared the board for what that actually means.
The gap between AI ambition and AI reality is almost never a technology problem. It is a data problem. A governance problem. A board mandate that was never issued.
The organisations getting this right have stopped asking about AI. They are asking about the foundations underneath it — their data strategy, their governance structures, their accountability frameworks. Whether the organisation is actually ready for what it has already approved.
That question determines everything else.
We built this Circle for the leaders who are ready to ask it.
Not the boards waiting for the technology to mature. Not the executives hoping a vendor will define the strategy. The ones who have understood that AI governance is not a technical challenge delegated to the data team. It is a leadership responsibility — and it requires a different kind of preparation.
The Executive Data and AI Circle exists at the place where that preparation happens. A private community for C-suite leaders, founders, and the data and AI professionals who support them — grounded in one conviction: the people who govern AI and the people who build it need to be in the same room.
When they are not, organisations fund ambition and deliver expensive noise.
This is an invitation.
To govern AI before it governs your strategy. To ask the harder questions before the investment is approved, the vendor is selected, or the program is already struggling. To stop reading about what AI means for business — and start understanding what it means for yours.
The Circle is not a newsletter. It is not a conference. It is the resource you return to before every board meeting, every AI investment decision, and every conversation where getting it wrong is not an option.
If that is where you are, you belong here.
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Data & AI Circle
A private community for board members, C-suite executives, and senior leaders. Exclusive weekly deep dives, live executive webinars, C-suite roundtables — and a peer network of people navigating the same challenges.
Think about LinkedIn, without the noise, without the marketing and sales. Just clear focus on AI & Data for the C-Suite. Curated, unbiased, independent.
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Frank shares weekly insights on AI & data governance, board dynamics, and data leadership with a growing community of executives and board members on LinkedIn.
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Weekly insights on AI & data governance | Semantics & Ontology
Keynotes & Executive Talks
Frank speaks at board conferences, executive summits, and innovation forums on AI governance, data strategy, and the organisational dynamics of digital transformation.
AI Governance for Boards
Data Strategy at C-Suite Level
From Data Ambition to Data Reality
Leading Without a Map
The Cashflow Deadline
The Cashflow Deadline is business novel that blends the urgency of a financial crisis with the precision of enterprise transformation. Set in Frankfurt, the story follows CFO Klara Vogel as she faces a stark reality: her company is 42 days away from a liquidity shortfall that could breach covenants and erode trust with lenders.
Coming soon
The Supply Chain Reckoning
The Supply Chain Reckoning is a business novel that blends the tension of corporate fraud with the discipline of data-driven transformation. Set across Frankfurt and Singapore, the story follows Klara Vogel — now co-founder of Soothfast Advisory — as she takes on her first major engagement: a consumer goods company whose numbers look clean, whose reporting looks managed, and whose supply chain is quietly unraveling from the inside out.