Marc Schröter on AI From the Bottom Up (Part 2/4)
- Ebbe Kjaersbo
- 10 hours ago
- 2 min read
In part two of our series, Marc Schröter shares how SimCorp is adopting AI internally, and why the most exciting innovation isn't coming from leadership mandates, but from the engineers and product managers finding their own use cases every week.
Key Takeaways
Leadership can set the structure, SimCorp created an AI Center of Enablement and funds specific use cases, but the real innovation comes bottom-up from teams on the ground.
Developers are already shifting to "vibe coding" through prompting rather than writing code manually, and teams are using AI to scan for regulatory changes and auto-update accounting standards.
SimCorp is planning a company-wide AI hackathon with Microsoft for 1,600 people in product development in early 2026.
The pace of organic AI adoption across teams is moving faster than any top-down initiative could drive.
Full Transcript
Marc Schröter:
As management or leadership, you can do a lot to encourage the use of AI from a top-down perspective. You can fund use cases, you can set up the structures. We, for instance, created an AI center of excellence. First, we call it, now we call it AI center of enablement. We offer a lot of learning and we can fund specific use cases.
So you can do a lot, but what is really striking is that engineers and product managers, they don't really need that. Of course they need support, they need to approve the newest AI models they want to use and so on. But the innovation really comes from the bottom up. They'll quickly find out what are the opportunities.
And I would say every week, every month, there are so many examples where I learn from our teams how they've used AI, how they've come up with new use cases, how they make their work more efficient.
We have teams who are scanning the internet for changes in regulation to find out whether we need to update our accounting standards and how to automatically update that into the system. Then we have developers who are virtually not coding anymore, but just prompting or using vibe coding and doing it automatically. So it just happens automatically.
We can do a lot from a leadership perspective. We are also planning to make a big next move or kind of promotion for 2026. We are planning a big hackathon here in the beginning of the year together with Microsoft, one of our key partners in this area, actually for the whole of product development, 1,600 people.
So we can do a lot, but in reality, the evolution, the innovation is coming automatically and it's really, really encouraging and nice to see.
This is Part 2 of our 4-part interview series with Marc Schröter. Previously: Marc Schröter on IBOR's Unfinished Promise (Part 1/4). Next week: Marc Schröter on the One-Platform Future (Part 3/4)
