ISTARIUM — smart solutions
AI that brings real value to a mid-sized company: realistic, profitable, in daily use.
What we stand for
AI in mid-sized companies that brings real value.
AI is a powerful tool, and we are enthusiastic about it ourselves. At its core, an AI venture in a mid-sized company is above all one thing: a process project. Understand the processes, define them properly, improve them and then automate.
Three key factors determine success. The first is the architecture of the application: which step of the work needs which technology at which point, so that real value is created, the solution is profitable and the cost stays predictable up front?
The second factor is the data. It is an asset of the company, not a by-product of its systems. That means knowing which data exists, where it originates, how good it is and who may use it, plus a data strategy that sets exactly that out. This data control is the core of data sovereignty.
The third factor is the people. The first step takes away the fear of the technology. The second brings it close: a protected environment where everyone gathers their own experience at no risk. In the third, the tools are integrated into everyday work and used there. In the fourth, your own AI champions step forward and see transformation and change management through.
An AI system that automates processes has to be profitable and bring real value. That is how we measure a venture: for the employees, for the company and for the shareholders.
Digital sovereignty, to us, is more than the question of where data is stored and processed. Sovereignty is built on knowledge: what AI can do, how it is built and what a decision actually means. That knowledge belongs in the boardroom and in management, that is where architecture, effort and value are decided. Which is exactly what our AI practice programme is for.
AI Enabled Executive
Reclaim your decision-making ability for AI initiatives.
A practice programme for owners, managing directors and senior managers who decide on AI initiatives or steer them. It conveys compressed experience rather than lecture material: the basis for a well-founded judgement of your own, and for the gut feeling that comes with it. So you decide yourself, set the course and steer the rollout.
The starting point is an AI venture of your own, which you implement yourself during the programme, across eight live-guided days in total. In doing so you experience working with AI intensively and first-hand. That is the core of the experience, and in our view a key skill for the years ahead: together with the expertise you already have, it adds up to a judgement nobody can make for you.
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AI Practice Programme
For leaders who want to reclaim command of their AI decisions: over eight weeks, on your own AI venture, with your own data and on your own AI server, you experience how a solution takes shape, gets debated and gets decided together. What stays is the knowledge you gained first-hand.
Individual setups are possible: duration, location and technical environment follow your project, including a compact workshop format on request. Talk to us.
All from one house
Solution and advisory from one house.
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Products and knowledge
AI solutions and the knowledge that teaches senior leaders to judge AI for themselves.
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Advisory and rollout
Architecture, transformation, AI adoption and rollout in mid-sized companies and manufacturing.
Our team
The people behind it.
Our roots are not in AI: a good twenty years of industry, operations and aftersales on one side, finance and processes on the other, plus data science and software development. We taught ourselves AI from the ground up, and today we build solutions from it that bring real value in day-to-day business.
Michael S. MaiSenior AI Solution ExpertInitiator and Coach AIEE Munich, married, 2 children
Over 20 years in industrial transformation and operations
Expert in profitable AI solutions
Focus: lasting transformation and change management
Tillmann GmelinSenior AI Solution ExpertAIEE Coach Munich, married, 3 children
Over 15 years in finance and operations
Focus: AI for cost, margins and financial KPIs
Bea KreuzmayrJunior AI Ambassador Munich, married, 2 children
Over 5 years in production and change
Focus: lasting transformation
Michael S. MaiSenior AI Solution ExpertInitiator and Coach AIEE
Family-run mid-sized businesses and manufacturing industry are my home. For 20 years I have guided them through digitalisation, change and sustainable value creation. I stay with it until ideas become real results.
From my own projects I keep finding the same thing: it is not the will that is missing, nor the ability: it is depth. In day-to-day business it simply gets lost. That is a shame, because it is exactly this depth that AI initiatives in a company need in order to deliver real results. Whoever penetrates one thing gains the view of the whole, and it is exactly this assured command that AIEE makes learnable.
AI is an exceptionally powerful tool. But to truly use it takes your own experience. That is why I created AIEE: not a lecture, but real hands-on experience on a project of your own, from which a robust judgement of your own emerges.
My aim is clear: mid-sized businesses should be put in a position to use the enormous potential of AI to their advantage. To create access, and to enable companies and their management to deploy AI profitably and productively. Because in the end a good AI application is a well-considered process improvement: profitable, cleanly prepared and close to the people who work with it.
What I pass on here I have lived through myself: in a few months I built my own apps, agents and automations self-taught, hand in hand with AI, and set up my own infrastructure. It thrills me every day, and it is exactly this enthusiasm I pass on to you in AIEE. I look forward to it.
In development
Our projects.
Examples from live client projects are at MAI Advisory Partners.
- Central connection intelligence for executives.
- The machine that speaks. Nothing leaves the plant.
- Personal and offline: record hard-won knowledge and pass it on.
Suppliers and memberships
- Servers in Germany: participant and AI servers hosted at Hetzner, data centres in Germany, ISO/IEC 27001, BSI C5 Type 2.
- AI models from STACKIT: European AI services through the cloud of Schwarz Digits, data centres in Germany, BSI C5 Type 2 attestation covering AI Model Serving.
- AI models from Mistral AI: a European provider based in France.
- AI models via the AWS European Sovereign Cloud: a separate Amazon Web Services cloud region in Germany, operated and governed entirely within Europe.
- GDPR and EU AI Act compliant: processing takes place exclusively within the European Union.
- Software developed in Germany: built and operated from Munich.
- No training on your data: contractually ruled out with every provider we use.
ISTARIUM Consulting Group GmbH is a member of the BVMW, the German association for small and medium-sized businesses, a participant in the Alliance for Cyber Security run by the BSI, Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security, and a partner in the network of F&P Executive Solutions AG.
Contact
We look forward to an open exchange, with no strings attached.
Juggle ideas, sound out potential, align on initiatives: we look forward to every discussion. Write to us about whatever is on your mind right now.
Michael Mai
Managing Director
Expert in AI adoption, transformation and industrial production.
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