TEN YEARS OF BUILDING AI THAT ACTUALLY WORKS
Kauz.ai has been part of the Future Tech Fest since it was still called Digital Demo Day. A small gathering for local startups back then, a 5,000-person festival today. German businesses. The Düsseldorf AI company grew alongside it, quietly deploying AI solutions to over 100 German businesses.
2016. No ChatGPT. No hype cycle. No billion-dollar valuations for wrapper apps. Just a team in Düsseldorf that decided to build AI for the German Mittelstand. Ten years later, Kauz.ai is still here, still delivering, and still growing.
The company was founded by Dr. Thomas Rüdel, a former McKinsey partner and current AI entrepreneur, and has grown to become one of the most experienced AI providers in the DACH region. Over 100 production deployments. Savings banks, municipal utilities, chambers of skilled trades, industrial companies. All running Kauz.ai in their daily operations, well beyond any pilot phase.
The platform is modular. aiWorkplace gives employees a company-internal GPT for research, analysis, and document work. aiWorkflows automates business processes with over 500 pre-built actions. aiStudio deploys AI chatbots into customer service that actually resolve tickets instead of just routing them.
What that looks like in practice can be measured. Customers report 65 percent support relief, more than half of all inquiries handled outside business hours, and a 93 percent onboarding rate among users.
Everything runs GDPR-compliant on European infrastructure, with guaranteed exclusion of customer data from LLM training. A smart routing feature called Kauz-Selection automatically picks the optimal language model per request, delivering frontier-level quality without frontier-level cost.
The Future Tech Fest has been a constant in Kauz.ai's calendar since the early days. "We were there when it was a small, focused meetup for local startups and corporates," says Rüdel. "The event has evolved enormously. Part trade fair, part conference, part community festival. A format that clearly works." In some years the team walks away with strong leads and dozens of conversations. In other years they simply enjoy being part of the tech community. Both have value.
At FTF26, Kauz.ai will demonstrate how AI-powered customer service works in practice. Decision-makers facing the question of how to introduce AI into their organization will find a team with over 100 projects of real-world experience at the booth.
Picture: Michael Lübke
