Ulrich Arnold is CEO of gkv informatik, the IT service provider for statutory health insurance companies in Germany. He is also driven by topics such as digitalisation and artificial intelligence – naturally, but still a highly regulated topic in the health insurance sector with its sensitive data.
In addition, the federal structure in Germany means that the market is very segmented, with a large number of statutory health insurance funds and regional branches. It is not easy to find the one system that everyone wants in this market.
Nevertheless, Ulrich is on the road with numerous prototypes in the evaluation of AI – there are more than enough use cases, and the offerings of large hyperscalers are also technically mature, although the gkv-informatik CEO views the functionality, availability and prices of the providers with suspicion.
Ulrich Arnold is not worried about the impact of AI on jobs, neither in his own field, IT, nor at the health insurance companies that his company works for. “Demographics are literally forcing us to make do with fewer workers.”
Ulrich is therefore more concerned about the employees he wants to keep on board in the transformation to an intelligent company with GenAI, because they are urgently needed there: “How can we give our employees the skills they need for the productive use of generative AI?” – Ulrich Arnold is certainly much more concerned with this question. Arnold also includes questions about the real benefits of AI and the transfer of PoCs and pilot projects into company-wide scaled applications.
His answer to this challenge: “I specifically deploy colleagues who are already motivated to work with AI as early adopters. They develop AI further, look for answers to productivity issues and act as multipliers to create snowball effects within the company.”
The gkv informatik CEO is also concerned about another topic: “We are undoubtedly in the midst of AI hype at the moment,” he says in view of the huge amount of attention the topic is receiving due to the launch of ChatGPT, as well as competing products from Google Meta and Amazon. “But we will also go throughthe Through of Disillusionment, as the Gartner hype cycle so beautifully puts it. How will we get through it?” worries Ulrich Arnold.
