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The defining question of artificial intelligence is no longer what it can do. It is which decisions we should entrust to it in the first place. With every new generation of intelligent systems, their influence on business, society and everyday life continues to grow. This is precisely where Sarah Spiekermann’s work begins.
Since 2009, she has served as Professor and Head of the Institute for Information Systems and Society at WU Vienna. Her research brings together technology, business and ethics at a time when rapid digital transformation makes this challenge more urgent than ever: designing systems that not only deliver efficiency, but also safeguard human freedom, responsibility and individual autonomy.
Following her advisory work for the European Commission, Spiekermann led the development of the world’s first international standard for ethical IT design. She is the originator of Value-based Engineering, an internationally recognised methodology that embeds ethical values into digital systems and artificial intelligence from the very beginning. She presented this framework in the seminal textbook Value-based Engineering, published in 2023. Her book Digital Ethics – A Value System for the 21st Century also brought these questions to a much broader audience. With more than one hundred peer-reviewed publications, she ranks among the world’s top two percent most-cited researchers in her field, according to Stanford University. In 2024, she founded the VBE Academy in Vienna, which trains professionals from around the world in ethical AI innovation. A year later, she established the Future Foundation.
For entrepreneurs and decision-makers, her perspective is of immediate practical relevance. They must decide not only which AI technologies to deploy, but also which responsibilities should be delegated to intelligent systems, which values must be embedded in technology, and where human judgement must remain the final authority. In this context, trust becomes a decisive business asset—for customers, employees and business partners alike.
At B-SAFE26, Sarah Spiekermann expands the concept of security by adding a crucial dimension. Anyone seeking to harness the power of artificial intelligence without surrendering control or compromising their own principles must learn to advance technological innovation and ethical responsibility together. Sarah Spiekermann demonstrates how this can be achieved.
