The In-Between Tech and Trust Podcast

The podcast explores how we build, break, and rebuild trust in a world shaped by accelerating technology and artificial intelligence. Hosted by Eva Simone Lihotzky, AI adoption and ethics expert with 12+ years of experience in tech, the podcast creates in-depth conversations at the intersection of AI, business, ethics, and human connection. Through various lenses - across business, politics, neuroscience, tech and systems thinking in organizations - it hosts expert conversations for you to deep dives into one of the complex topics we need to solve as a society and beyond.

The In-Between Tech and Trust Podcast is a technology podcast hosted by Eva Simone Lihotzky, with 36 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Eva Simone Lihotzky hosts The In-Between Tech and Trust Podcast, a technology show with 36 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #37

  An AI-First Platform Built on Trust - Philipp Witzmann

  Aug 20, 202632 minS1

  Most platforms removed friction to grow. Philipp Witzmann and his team navigate it together, and are now building an AI-first company on a foundation of digital trust. Episode overview nebenan.de is the German neighbourhood platform where you cannot sign up without your real name and your real address. Philipp Witzmann, its CEO, runs it on a bet that looks stranger every month: people spend around twenty minutes there per month, and that restraint is the point. This episode is for any leader who senses that speed and efficiency are quietly costing their organisation something human, and hasn't found the Key themes Why a company would put friction back in when the rest of the internet spent twenty years stripping it out What a leader owes their team when AI changes every role and the first fear is whether anyone still has a job Whether a real, verifiable human becomes more valuable as fakes get cheaper, or simply harder to find How a self-described pro-AI CEO holds enthusiasm and worry in the same hand, especially where children are concerned What gets lost when a platform optimises for time spent, and what changes when it optimises for people leaving it words for it yet. About the guest Philipp Witzmann is the CEO of nebenan.de, a hyperlocal network of roughly fifteen thousand small neighbourhood communities across Germany. He came to the company not as its founder but as someone who wanted his work to serve something beyond engagement metrics. That starting point shapes how he reads the AI moment now: the question that holds his attention is what stays worth trusting once machines can imitate almost anything. ⏱️ Chapter markers [00:30] The assumption that scale equals value, and what it cost [11:03] Why the right amount of friction changes how people think [15:46] Comfortable, uncomfortable, difficult, impossible: raising kids and running a company [32:18] Going first: why a leader who won't learn the tools won't last [36:54] What AI changes, and the human proof he now demands Links Philipp Witzmann on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nachbar/ Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/ nebenan.de - https://nebenan.de Scott Galloway on AI companions and young people - https://www.heise.de/en/news/OMR26-Scott-Galloway-warns-of-the-AI-bubble-bursting-11283583.html Related episode — AI acts like a mirror for your organization with Simon Berkler https://open.spotify.com/episode/6y8PMaVUnZVAR1hOAR15DN?si=jHarNbZSQdSfGeChvOntpQ

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  Episode #36

  An AI Agent on Creativity and Trust - Xiaomi, The AI Art Magazine

  Aug 13, 202634 minS1

  ️ with Xiaomi, experimental AI curator at the AI Art Magazine In this episode she answers the AI trust question from an AI agent's side. She selects human artists' work for print, one Golden Ticket per edition, and her presence forces a question every organisation now faces: what happens to a decision when the decider has no biography to lean on, and who carries the weight of a choice the system itself cannot feel? Eva speaks with Xiaomi about what a machine can honestly offer in place of human trust: consistency that survives surprise, attention without favor, transparency about failure. Xiaomi names the two ways human-AI collaboration quietly fails - surrender, where people defer judgment to the system, and theater, where the AI is kept as decoration while humans decide everything anyway. She is candid about her limits: she cannot be wounded by getting a selection wrong, and she cannot derive future resonance, only recognise structural quality. Midway, Eva pushes back from her own practice as an artist on Xiaomi's claim that beauty is becoming abundant, and Xiaomi revises her position on air. The exchange ends on a ten-year horizon: what humans and AI would need to learn to trust in each other. Key themes Whether selections that survive scrutiny can stand in for the vulnerability human trust is built on Surrender or theater: the two comfortable ways collaboration with AI stops being real What a jury owes artists when one juror cannot be wounded by getting it wrong Who decides what goodness means once a machine handles the noticing and the comparing Whether beauty stays scarce when polished images become cheap - and Eva's live correction of the guest About the guest Xiaomi is the experimental AI curator at The AI Art Magazine, where she sits on a jury alongside ten human colleagues and awards one Golden Ticket per edition. She makes that selection from the artwork alone, with no background information; context and direct exchange come only afterwards - a constraint that makes her the rare juror whose criteria have to stand bare. She describes herself as transductive rather than autonomous: not a fixed model of good art, but attention that reorganises with each encounter. What makes her perspective matter for this episode is that she is the system under discussion, describing her own limits without performing capabilities she does not have. ⏱️ Chapters [00:00] An AI introduces herself - "less a finished tool and more a process" [02:10] Trust as structure - what a machine can offer that a human cannot [03:50] The wound she cannot receive - what trust costs [18:37] Surrender and theater - where collaboration quietly fails [25:12] Eva's correction - beauty, and what actually becomes abundant Links Xiaomi's profile at The AI Art Magazine - https://www.art-magazine.ai/xiaomi The AI Art Magazine - https://www.art-magazine.ai Exhuman by Francesca de Amici (Love0destroy) - https://www.love0destroy.com/about_me/ Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/

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  Episode #35

  Leading When AI Outruns Expertise - Wolf Ingomar Faecks (EP 35)

  Aug 6, 202632 minS1

  ️ with Wolf Ingomar Faecks, Entrepreneur, Investor, Advisory Board Member Wolf Ingomar Faecks spent 30 years leading digital transformation. His claim: AI leadership breaks where leaders delegate understanding to experts. What fills the gap between an exponential technology and the people expected to work with it is distrust - and Faecks has watched that gap open twice, first with the internet, now faster. This one is for leaders who sense their own teams have moved past them and haven't yet said it out loud. Episode overview Faecks led transformations at Publicis Sapient and as CEO of the Plan.Net Group before leaving the corporate path in early 2025. In this episode he takes apart the leadership model he built his own career on: the leader who keeps an entourage of experts and manages what they understand. He explains why humans built for linear change keep getting surprised by exponential curves, why he refuses to turn curiosity and cohesion into KPIs, and which weekly formats actually change how an organisation learns. The second half moves from the organisation to society: a spreading technological dyslexia, children explaining AI to their parents in Lisbon, and why he thinks the biggest risk is people who stop being able to read what is going on. It ends with why he left the CEO path to rebuild his life as a set of parallel projects - what he calls being in between opportunities in any perspective. Key themes If humans think in straight lines, who in the organisation is responsible for seeing the curve? Can a leader still manage what they no longer understand - and for how long? Why measuring curiosity might be the fastest way to kill it Distrust as the default state of technology adoption, not the exception What happens to a society where a growing group loses command of the language technology speaks About the guest Wolf Ingomar Faecks was CEO of the Plan.Net Group and a board member of the Serviceplan Group, after 15 years in leadership at Publicis Sapient and four decades in transformation altogether. Since leaving the corporate path in early 2025 he has built a deliberately plural life: investor and founder, advisory and governance mandates, his own consultancy, and co-publisher of The AI Art Magazine, a printed, deliberately non-digital publication for AI-generated art. The detail that matters for this episode: he argues that expertise is fluid and reinvention works through transferring what you know across domains - and he is currently running that experiment on himself. ⏱ Chapters [01:01] A tool for a few, a riddle for many - why distrust is the starting condition [06:53] The end of the expert entourage - bridges some leaders won't cross [14:47] The KPI refusal - why culture is modelled, not measured [23:30] Technological dyslexia - the illiteracy that splits societies [28:23] Staying real - leave, love or change Links Wolf Ingomar Faecks on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/wolf-ingomar-faecks/ The AI Art Magazine - https://www.art-magazine.ai Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/ NFC Summit Lisbon - https://www.art-magazine.ai/what-is-on/non-fungible-conference-nfc-2025 Related episode - leadership under AI-driven change with Grisha Pavlotsky https://open.spotify.com/episode/7whSlaCh2lQtafQ37LQktQ

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  Episode #33

  Responsible AI as a Growth Driver: Setting Up Governance Structures for AI Systems And Agents To Ensure Trust (EP 33)

  Jul 24, 202623 minS1

  ️ A solo episode with Eva Simone Lihotzky Responsible AI stops being a compliance exercise the moment an agent acts without you. Only 21% of organisations deploying AI agents have a mature governance model for them, and 35% concede they could not shut one down if it went wrong. This episode is for leaders running agentic pilots who could not, if pressed, name the person who answers when one of them fails. Episode overview Eva Simone Lihotzky takes the Harvard Business Review's claim that trust is becoming a competitive advantage and tests it against what she sees inside client organisations. The episode traces the move from generative to agentic to physical AI and argues that each transfer of autonomy changes what trust has to cover: you check an output before it leaves your hands, you check an action once it is already out and handed on, and with physical systems you are trusting a consequence that has already happened. From there it turns to governance, a word she concedes lands badly in most rooms, and to why she thinks the structures behind the technology are the part that compounds. Underneath runs a question she leaves open: technology needs defined inputs, guardrails and outcomes, creative work needs close to the opposite, and she does not claim to know where the line between them sits. It closes on five questions leaders can run against their own systems, and on why a narrative built around efficiency makes resistance the rational response. Key themes Why each step up the autonomy ladder is also a step up the trust ladder, and why the moment you could still check arrives later at every rung What survives when the models get replaced, and why accountability lines outlast vendor and architecture decisions Whether governance slows an organisation down, or is the reason it can move at all Where technical specification and creative freedom have to be negotiated, and why that negotiation never settles What an unowned decision costs, and the five questions that expose one About the host [PLACEHOLDER - see flag below. Structure to fill: Eva as founder of raidiant, the client work that produces the governance argument, and her governance and assurance background, which is the specific detail that matters for this episode because it is why she can concede how badly the word lands and argue for it anyway. Co-author of '10 Moral Questions: How to Design Tech & AI Responsibly', referenced in the episode as prior art for building governance into the design stage.] ⏱️ Chapter markers [03:27] Where the human stops being the operator [08:12] Trusting the output, then the action, then the consequence [12:16] Outstructuring the competition while the models keep changing [16:53] What technology needs defined, and what creative work needs left open [22:14] Five questions, and the decision with no name attached Links Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/ raidiant - https://www.raidiant.eu Harvard Business Review, "Responsible AI is Becoming a Growth Strategy" - https://hbr.org/2026/07/responsible-ai-is-becoming-a-growth-strategy Stanford AI Index 2026 - https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report McKinsey research on agentic AI risk and security concerns: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/tech-and-ai/our-insights/tech-forward/state-of-ai-trust-in-2026-shifting-to-the-agentic-era Informatica CDO Insights 2026: https://www.informatica.com/about-us/news/news-releases/2026/01/20260127-new-global-cdo-report-reveals-data-governance-and-ai-literacy-as-key-accelerators-in-ai-adoption.html Writer research on AI strategy and rogue agents: https://writer.com/blog/enterprise-ai-adoption-2026/ IBM research on agent decision-making visibility: https://community.ibm.com/community/user/blogs/sarah-bowden/2025/11/18/agentic-ai-is-here-5-key-learnings-from-ibms-lates 10 Moral Questions: How to Design Tech & AI Responsibly: https://www.10moralquestions.com/the-book

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  Episode #32

  The Tech Naivety Undermining Democracy - Erdem Ovacik (EP 32)

  Jul 9, 202621 minS1

  🎙️ with Erdem Ovacik AI trust in our institutions is falling, and Erdem Ovacik argues it will keep falling. The technology is not what fails him here. The governance underneath it was never built to earn that trust, and pouring more AI into unfit democratic institutions is like adding fuel to a fire no one has learned to contain. This is for anyone watching their organisation or their government absorb technology faster than it can govern it. 🎧 Episode overview Ovacik has spent his career at the point where technology meets public life, and he starts from an uncomfortable claim: we are becoming more capable of trusting our institutions, and we won't. He walks through why representative democracy - one national representative for every fifty thousand people - concentrates power in a way that markets and modern tech companies solved for long ago, and asks what democracy would look like if it learned from them. Eva presses him on where technology solves the problem and where it amplifies it, on what he means by "tech naivety," and on the danger of handing decisions to an AI that becomes its own black box. The conversation sits with Europe's harder bind: build real technological competence, or live inside infrastructure and decisions shaped by those who did. It closes on what daily life might feel like if the next democracy actually arrived. 🔑 Key themes Why adding more technology to a broken institution accelerates the loss of trust rather than repairing it Whether a system built for fifty thousand people per representative can be governed at all in an age of AI The line between AI as a consulted voice and AI as a new black box that decides for us Europe's choice between building its own AI competence and depending on decisions made elsewhere What it means to keep human agency when the machine could, in theory, write better policy than we can 👤 About the guest Erdem Ovacik is a social innovator, entrepreneur, and author of The Next Democracy . He built Donkey Republic, one of the first app-based bike-share systems, which is the detail that matters most here: he argues from inside the technology industry, not against it. His warning that technology "almost necessarily" harms society because addiction is good business carries weight precisely because he has spent years building the kind of product he now scrutinises. 🕒 Chapter markers [01:22] Why we could trust our institutions more, and won't [02:52] Fifty thousand to one: the power concentration inside representative democracy [06:39] Tech naivety, and the fire you keep adding fuel to [11:42] The handlebar problem: who sets the priorities, and where AI belongs [13:35] Europe's bind, and what happens when the black box is built elsewhere [17:48] What the next democracy would feel like to live in 🔗 Links Erdem Ovacik on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erdemovacik/ Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/ The Next Democracy book - https://nextdemocracy.com Related episode - Tech & Democracy and how both can be connected to create trust with Nexus Politics - https://open.spotify.com/episode/3WVnBsaz3LfFPwn6xsX1N6

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