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

🎙️ 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