Romano Roth
Helping CTOs & CIOs turn AI ambition into an operating model: feedback loops, governance, and execution across people, process, technology | CAIO @ Zühlke | Author | Lecturer | Speaker
Zürich, Switzerland
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I believe the next competitive edge isn’t AI itself, it’s the organisation around it. Feedback loops, governance, and continuous adaptation across people, process, and technology.
My Story
With over two decades in the technology sector, I focus on AI-augmented delivery, platform engineering, and enterprise evolution. As Group Chief AI Officer (CAIO) at Zühlke, I shape the global strategy and service portfolio for AI-Augmented Delivery & Platform, AI integration, platform engineering, and cloud solutions. My work redefines how organizations innovate, adapt, and scale in industries such as finance, insurance, cybersecurity, energy, healthcare, and aerospace.
In a world reshaped by Artificial Intelligence (AI), I believe the key to resilience and competitiveness lies in becoming AI-augmented, AI-enabled, and ultimately AI-native: a new operating model driven by feedback loops, intelligent workflows, and self-learning systems that place customer success at the center. I empower companies to continuously create value by harmonizing people, processes, technology, and AI.
I began my journey at Zühlke more than two decades ago, evolving from software engineer and architect to trusted consultant, and now to my leadership role as Chief AI Officer. My passion for value creation through automation and quality led me from engineering into the DevOps movement and further into the forefront of enterprise transformation.
I organize the monthly DevOps Meetup in Zürich and serve as president of DevOpsDays Zürich, an annual conference within the global DevOps movement. I share my insights via my YouTube channel, with over 500 videos, and through well over 30 blog articles focused on DevOps, architecture, leadership, and transformation.
My commitment to thought leadership and education extends to my role as a lecturer in DevOps leadership, agile methodologies, digital transformation, and enterprise architecture at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. I champion a culture of innovation and agility, helping enterprises evolve into adaptive systems capable of thriving in complex, fast-changing environments.
My work has been recognized through several awards and honors, reflecting my contributions to technology leadership and digital transformation.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Transforming DevOps with Azure: Platform Engineering for the Digital Age
In today’s rapidly evolving business environment, organizations face unprecedented challenges: rapidly shifting customer demands, intensifying competition, and a growing shortage of skilled professionals. Agility and speed have become critical to survival. This talk will showcase how Platform Engineering, powered by Azure, serves as the foundation for overcoming these challenges. By automating complex workflows and infrastructure provisioning, it delivers the scalability and flexibility needed to adapt swiftly, innovate faster, and address skill gaps effectively.
Through in-depth insights, real-world examples, and a live platform demo, this session will explore how Azure-driven platform strategies can transform development processes, enhance productivity, and enable the rapid delivery of high-quality software. Attendees will discover actionable techniques for overcoming scaling challenges, improving developer experience, and streamlining operations by leveraging DevOps practices within a robust, Azure-integrated platform.
Experience Report: How to introduce DevOps in a large enterprise?
Introducing DevOps in a large enterprise is difficult.
But wait – why do we want to introduce DevOps in the first place?
Good question. I will answer the question in my talk and show you what happens when you introduce DevOps and what did not happen.
I will show you how we changed the continuous integration pipeline, changed the architecture, scaled up the delivery from 1 team to 7 teams, automated the deployment, automated the testing, improved the operation, started scanning for security issues, analysing performance issues, monitoring the application and changed the culture.
Harnessing the Power of Enterprise Architecture and AI for Strategic Advantage
In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, enterprises must strategically leverage advanced technologies to stay competitive and drive innovation. This presentation will explore the intersection of Enterprise Architecture and Artificial Intelligence, focusing on how organizations can implement and benefit from robust platform strategies. The session will provide actionable insights and real-world examples to help you lead your organization into the future. You will leave with a clear understanding of how to develop and implement a successful platform strategy, effectively leverage platform engineering, and integrate AI into your DevOps processes to drive efficiency and innovation.
Developer Experience and Platform Engineering
In today’s rapidly evolving landscape, businesses are constantly confronted with changing customer needs, increased competition, and a significant shortage of skilled workers. Agility and speed are no longer optional—they are critical to survival. In this talk, I will demonstrate how Platform Engineering can act as the cornerstone for addressing these challenges, providing the scalability and flexibility necessary to adapt swiftly, innovate faster, and bridge the skills gap by automating complex workflows.
This session will offer in-depth insights into how platform-centric strategies transform the development process, driving productivity and enabling the rapid delivery of high-quality software. Through real-world examples, a live demo of a platform, and case studies, I will illustrate how companies can overcome common scaling hurdles, improve developer experience, and streamline operations by leveraging DevOps practices within a well-designed platform.
AI-Augmented DevOps: Leveraging Platform Engineering for Efficiency and Innovation
In this talk, we'll explore the transformative potential of integrating AI into DevOps and platform engineering. This fusion not only automates and optimizes workflows but also propels efficiency and innovation. Attendees will learn about practical AI implementations that enhance software development through real-world examples and emerging trends. We'll cover the challenges and strategies for embedding AI into DevOps processes and the role of platform engineering in supporting this integration. This talk aims to equip participants with insights and actionable strategies to leverage AI for improving their DevOps practices, ensuring they're at the forefront of technological advancement in software development.
AI-augmented DevOps: Der Weg zum Cybernetic Enterprise
Künstliche Intelligenz wird Entwickler:innen nicht ersetzen, aber sie wird grundlegend verändern, wie Software gebaut wird. Gerade in der Versicherungsbranche, wo Resilienz, Compliance und Vertrauen entscheidend sind, geht es nicht um Hype, sondern um solide Grundlagen.
Diese Keynote stellt das Konzept der Cybernetic Enterprise vor: ein feedbackgetriebenes System, in dem Menschen, Prozesse, Technologie und KI harmonisch zusammenspielen.
Anhand von AI-Augmented DevOps und Platform Engineering erfahren Sie, wie Versicherungen ihren Entwickler:innen Self-Service-Plattformen bereitstellen, KI-Fähigkeiten „as a Service“ integrieren und autonome Teams befähigen können, sichere und qualitativ hochwertige Software mit hoher Geschwindigkeit zu liefern.
Die Teilnehmenden lernen, wie man den AI-Nebel durchdringt, den Software-Lebenszyklus industrialisiert und adaptive Systeme entwirft, die sich kontinuierlich weiterentwickeln.
What is the business case for DevOps?
Everyone wants to do DevOps. But only a few understand what DevOps is and what it does with your company. When you want to introduce DevOps in a company you need to convince decision-makers that it is worth investing money/time/resources into the DevOps transformation. They will ask you about the business case and the return on investment of DevOps. In this talk, I will show you how to convince the decision-maker about the business case and the return on investment of DevOps, so that you get the money/time and resources for your DevOps transformation.
Container Days 2019: What is the Business Case of DevOps?https://youtu.be/u_apBFUuMs0
DevOpsDays Zürich 2019: What is the Business Case of DevOps?https://vimeo.com/344516688
This talk will be fully updated with my newest experience and to the audience. I'm also currently working on a mathematical model to calculate the cost of unused features or poorly developed features. This will then be included in this talk.
How to architect for continuous delivery
You want to continuously deliver value to your customer whether you create a new product or maintain an existing product. To do this you need to architect for continuous delivery. This for sure includes a continuous delivery pipeline (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline). But it also includes that you architect your product for continuous delivery.
In this talk, I will show you, with concrete examples, how to architect for continuous delivery.
DevOps – Thinking in Systems & Value Streams
In today's world, everybody wants to do DevOps. But why? What problems are we trying to solve?
Together, we will take a step back and look at how you can architect for continuous delivery.
AI-Augmented DevOps with Platform Engineering
Explore the fusion of AI with DevOps and platform engineering to automate workflows, enhance efficiency, and drive innovation. Learn about cutting-edge tools, practices, and future trends.
The Digital Factory
Many companies are suffering from a lack of alignment between business and IT, silo thinking, and inefficiencies in product development, while time to market is becoming increasingly important.
These companies try to adapt DevOps in their organizations, but unfortunately, sometimes the DevOps approach is misunderstood, wrongly implemented, and it does not scale as expected.
We are entering the age of the industrialization of software development. The Digital Factory together with Platform Engineering will help industrialize digital product development across teams to efficiently develop products and improve the lives of our staff, time to market, quality, and alignment.
What you will learn:
- What are the current challenges
- What is DevOps
- How to scale DevOps
- Platform Engineering
- How to implement a Digital Factory
Why do we want to introduce DevOps?
Introducing DevOps in a large enterprise is difficult.
But wait – why do we want to introduce DevOps in the first place?
Good question. I will answer the question in my lightning talk and show you what happens when you introduce DevOps and what did not happen.
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