Agenda 2026: The future is made of courage

I had a different kind of start to the year, as the first few days of the new year began ascetically for me: I was on a fasting cure for almost a week. Water, a thin water soup - in which a carrot or tomato was alternately cooked but removed before serving - and a glass of fresh fruit juice in the evening. That was it. For six days. An exciting experience for me. I could feel my body shutting down and switching to a kind of emergency program. I was hungry from time to time, of course. But at the same time, I was able to relax wonderfully and slept a lot. This allowed me to sort out my thoughts and I now feel like I'm starting the new year with a lot of strength and confidence.
 

Shaping the future together

You probably know this from yourself: Over the past few months, we have focused a lot on the "outside". Wars, recession and geopolitics are keywords that immediately spring to mind. There is news about them every day. Rarely is it positive. Will anything change in 2026? Probably not. This makes it all the more important that we focus on our strengths and what each and every one of us can do to help things get back on track. We can't influence external factors anyway. As Deutsche Interim AG, we know our strength: we are the solution provider for the German economy. We provide experienced and highly qualified specialists and managers to companies. These professionals support companies in overcoming current challenges - be it in terms of transformation, reorganization and restructuring, crisis management or succession planning. Can we do even better? Of course!
 

We reap what we sow

2025 was a year of upheaval for us. We not only restructured the team, but also set the course for the future in terms of strategy and technology. The necessary decisions were sometimes painful, and the resulting measures were difficult to implement. But every single one was and is right.
 

Website relaunch

Our website has been shining in new splendor since July 2025. We have left no pixel or HTML code snippet untouched - from the structure and content to the processes and offers. Today, the website is our most important flagship. Since the fall, we have been working on the relaunch of the website of Swiss Interim, our sister company. We are confident that this relaunch will take place within a few weeks.
 

Introduction of candidate dossiers

A key process for us is the selection and presentation of candidates for project assignments with our clients. Since summer 2025, companies that request support from us no longer receive anonymized CVs from us, but candidate dossiers. These uniformly prepared dossiers in our corporate design underline our own quality standards - especially as the interim professionals presented in them can contribute to the presentation of their skills and experience.
 

Publication of member profiles

My not-so-secret passion is making data usable. With Matchmaker, our search engine for interim management, we have taken the first important step: while interim managers maintain their profiles in our database, companies can use Matchmaker to find specialists and managers themselves. The next step for us can only be to automatically create a member profile for each pool member and publish it on our website - naturally in compliance with German data protection regulations. In this way, we refine the data that the approximately 4,500 interim professionals in our database provide us with for the purpose of placing them in mandates and projects. Each individual member can influence how the aggregated data that appears in the member profile should look.
 

Expanding our Academy program

The relaunch of our website allowed us to further develop the already very successful webinars. The result is the di-Academy. Interested parties can not only register for our webinars there, but also book paid services directly via the new marketplace - from website creation and photo shoots to profile creation and positioning, personal branding and the AI-supported creation of LinkedIn posts. The topics that are so important for interim professionals, such as bogus self-employment and liability or insurance in interim management, also have their place. Take a look!
 

Corporate AI

The topic of AI is a divisive one. But for me, there is no way around it. The question of how we can and want to use artificial intelligence for ourselves has been driving the entire team for some time. Some see the opportunity and are working passionately on solutions, others are still skeptical and are taking a wait-and-see approach. 2025 was the year of experimentation for us. Initially, we tried our hand at a chatbot for Matchmaker. However, the OpenAI interface we used proved to be too slow. We then installed our own language models on our existing server and experimented with them. We quickly realized that this server would collapse under the load of more intensive AI usage. So we decided to build our own AI technology stack. All the measures we have taken allow us to set up prompt-based processes and use them operationally.

READING TIP
In the article AI in recruiting, you can find out more about our technological approach. We also explain why - despite AI - people are always at the heart of everything we do.

In the future, we will develop Matchmaker into an AI-based recruiting assistant. But even this sophisticated technology will never replace our service. Recruitment is and remains a people business. Trust is our most important currency. Trust requires encounters - between people, not machines. That's why we maintain personal contact with our clients and the interim professionals in our pool.
 

Wanted: beta testers!

Are you a AI pioneer and were one of the first to use artificial intelligence in business? Then you are the right person for us! We are looking for technology-savvy people who want to work with us to further develop Matchmaker. Sign up for the list of beta testers. We will contact you as soon as the beta phase begins.

Your registration as a beta tester
Click on the arrow at the end of the article and fill out the registration form. And off you go!

In conclusion, I would like to repeat the guiding principle from the beginning: The future is made of courage. Let's move things forward for the better together!

Yours
Tilo Ferrari
and the entire Deutsche Interim AG team