Big Techday 26: How to OWN the AI – Building a custom AI workmate for Bank Frick - Bank Frick & TNG

How to OWN the AI – Building a custom AI workmate for Bank Frick Many companies want to harness the great potential of AI to increase efficiency, speed, and quality in a targeted manner. However, ready-made solutions like ChatGPT or Claude are often problematic from a data protection perspective and often too generic to be truly integrated effectively and fruitfully into everyday work. Creating an alternative offering that provides similar basic functions but also targeted integrations for specific use cases is challenging. In this talk, Christopher Köhldorfer, Dr. Jannis Zeller and Johannes Esslinger will show how they set up a modular architecture of the AI platform at Bank Frick to enable the long-term vision of scalable automation of knowledge-intensive tasks along the entire value chain. About the speakers: Christopher Köhldorfer: Christopher Köhldorfer is Head of Business Transformation at Bank Frick. He has held various leadership roles at Bank Frick since 2017, including Head of Business Engineering. Previously, he worked as Project Lead for Digitalisation at Hypo Vorarlberg and as Business Intelligence Manager at Actinium Consulting. He studied Software Engineering at FH Dornbirn and holds an EMBA in Digital Transformation from FH Graubünden. Dr. Jannis Zeller : Dr. Jannis Zeller studied physics (B.Sc.) and subsequently mathematics, physics, and education sciences (M.Ed.) at RWTH Aachen University (2015-2021). He then pursued his PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) at RWTH Aachen and Paderborn University on applying Machine Learning and AI for automated assessment of pedagogical content knowledge of prospective physics teachers which he completed in April 2025. Since May 2025, Jannis has been working at TNG and on the project with Bank Frick to develop and implement the AI vision. In addition to developing AI solutions in the project, he actively contributes to advancing and conducting TNG workshops on Model Context Protocol and Retrieval Augmented Generation. Johannes Esslinger: Johannes Esslinger is a Software Consultant at TNG Technology Consulting with a master's degree in Computer Science. During his master's thesis in the field of Artificial Intelligence, he investigated various Machine Learning models for approximating distributions. At TNG, his special focus is also on AI: He has experience in training generative AI models, building Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, and implementing agent systems with integration of MCP servers. He supports projects from architectural design through implementation to productive deployment in business processes.