Miriam Meckel

Why organisations work with Miriam Meckel

• She runs the leadership academy that European boards turn to when they need their executive layer fluent in AI, quantum and adjacent technologies, which gives her a live read on where senior teams actually get stuck.
• Her 2024 book with Lea Steinacker, “Alles uberall auf einmal”, is one of the most cited German-language treatments of generative AI for business audiences, anchored in regulation, labour markets and governance rather than hype.
• She combines a serious academic chair at the University of St. Gallen with two decades inside business media, including the editorship of WirtschaftsWoche, so her framing is built for executive audiences rather than translated for them.
• Her work on brain-computer interfaces and cognitive enhancement gives her unusual range when the conversation moves from current AI deployment to the next horizon of human-machine integration.
• She holds the 2025 Rudolf-Diesel-Medaille for Best Media Communication, a recognition explicitly tied to making complex future technologies practical for executive audiences.

Biography highlights

• Co-founder and CEO of ada Learning GmbH, the AI and transformation academy spun out of Handelsblatt Media Group with Lea Steinacker and Verena Pausder.
• Professor of Communication Management and Director of the Institute for Media and Communication Management, University of St. Gallen.
• Co-author of “Alles uberall auf einmal” (Rowohlt, 2024) on artificial intelligence; author of “Mein Kopf gehort mir” (Piper, 2018) on brain-computer interfaces.
• Former editor-in-chief and publisher of WirtschaftsWoche, the first woman to lead the title.
• Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society; board member of Swiss media group Tamedia.
• Recipient of the Rudolf-Diesel-Medaille (2025), Ernst Schneider Prize, Cicero Speaker’s Prize for Science, Eisenhower Fellowship and John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellowship.

Biography

Generative AI sits on most executive agendas and inside very few operating models. The space between those two facts is where European leadership teams currently lose months. Miriam Meckel works in that gap, professionally and intellectually.

As co-founder and CEO of ada Learning, she runs the academy that puts senior managers from major European companies through structured programmes on AI, quantum and the technologies reshaping their industries. The work is concrete: how a CFO should think about model risk, how an HR leader should redesign roles around AI capability, how a CEO should commission and challenge an AI strategy. Her 2024 book with Lea Steinacker, “Alles uberall auf einmal”, argues that AI is best understood as a data-driven human amplifier, a framing that cuts through both utopian and apocalyptic readings of the technology.

Her authority comes from holding two distinct positions at the same time. She is Professor of Communication Management at the University of St. Gallen and Director of its Institute for Media and Communication Management, with research credentials reaching back to Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center. She is also a working operator who edited WirtschaftsWoche, sits on the Tamedia board, and has built ada into a recognised institution in the German-speaking executive market. Her 2018 book “Mein Kopf gehort mir” took the same operator-academic approach to brain-computer interfaces, with first-person experiments inside the laboratories developing them.

For boards confronting AI, she offers something the consultancy reports cannot: a researcher who teaches the technology to executives every week and reports back what they understand, what they resist, and what actually moves once they leave the room.

Key speaking topics

• Generative AI in business strategy
• AI governance, regulation and ethics
• The future of work in an AI-enabled economy
• Brain-computer interfaces and human enhancement
• Quantum computing for executive audiences
• Digital transformation and leadership
• Media, communication and information overload

Ideal for

• Boards and executive committees commissioning AI strategy and asking whether their AI position has any operational substance.
• CHROs and chief learning officers redesigning workforce capability around AI.
• CEOs and strategy leaders in regulated European industries balancing AI ambition with the EU AI Act and national supervision.
• Senior leadership programmes and executive offsites at the point of confronting AI seriously rather than in passing.

Audience outcomes

• A working mental model of where generative AI is already operational, where it remains pilot, and where it is still speculative.
• A clear read on the EU, US and Chinese regulatory environments and what they mean for European firms.
• Sharper questions to ask vendors, internal AI teams and consultants, grounded in how the technology actually behaves.
• An honest sense of what AI will do to roles, teams and decision rights inside their own organisation over the next three to five years.
• A bridge between today’s deployment questions and the next horizon of human-machine integration, including neural interfaces and quantum.