Barbara Arnst works on how companies are organised for the AI age — the operating model first, the technology after.

She has come at that question from four sides over twenty-five years: Principal at Bain, Partner at private equity firm Gimv, COO at Groupon, and VP Transformation at Telenet, where she led a company-wide operating model transformation. She now runs her own independent advisory practice.

She speaks about rewiring operating models, human-AI collaboration at enterprise scale, and why most transformations fail at execution rather than at strategy. The Telenet work is published as a reference case in the second edition of Team Topologies, and she is a Team Topologies Advocate.

She holds an MBA from INSEAD and studied Sinology at KU Leuven. She lives in Antwerp.