Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has appointed Stefan Brock as head of the newly established AI Center of Excellence in Central Europe. Brock's team's core task is to help customers make the step from technical trial and error to real business value with artificial intelligence (AI). This includes, for example, the development of value-adding and scalable AI applications, technical implementation and support for organisational transformation, including cooperation with employee representatives.

‘AI is not just a new application – it has far-reaching effects on employees, security, costs and business models,’ says Stefan Brock. ’Development has reached a critical point: now it is being decided who can use the opportunities of generative AI to create sustainable competitive advantages. The AI Center of Excellence has an icebreaker function for this. We are helping to achieve this goal as quickly as possible, but also in a strategically and technologically sound manner.’

Together with a partner ecosystem, the AI Center of Excellence offers a broad portfolio of services and technical solutions – including assessment and discovery, use case development, strategy development and architecture design, roadmap planning, testing and prototyping, transformation, programme management, model-as-a-service offerings and private cloud AI. For technical testing and benchmarking, Brock's team uses the TISAX-certified HPE Customer Technology Center in Böblingen and the HPE Customer Innovation Center in Geneva.

Another important task of the AI Center of Excellence is to build a community of users and technology partners to share experiences and best practices. A first kick-off event with leading industry representatives from the greater Stuttgart area will take place in Böblingen on 25 March 2025. Further events are planned at locations in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Before his appointment as head of the AI Centre of Excellence, Stefan Brock was Industry Partner and Strategist at HPE Central Europe, where he advised companies in the automotive and manufacturing industries on the development and implementation of data and AI strategies. Prior to that, he was Head of IT Architecture at Swissport, Head of Production Architecture at Swisscom and Chief Technology Officer at several companies. Stefan Brock holds a degree in engineering from RWTH Aachen and an MBA from Henley Management College.

Brock is considered the mastermind behind data-centric architectures and business models. He is co-author of the book ‘Data-Centric Architecture for Dummies’ and editor of the forthcoming book ‘Das datenzentrische Unternehmen’ (De Gruyter), in which experts and practitioners from industries such as automotive, aerospace, financial services, engineering, medicine and IT report on their experiences, methods and best practices.

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