Inside T-Systems: 3 Questions for Dr Maja-Olivia Himmer, AI Lead in the CTO Office of T-Systems

As part of our “3 Questions” series with AIDAQ 2025 partners, we spoke with Dr Maja-Olivia Himmer, AI Lead in the CTO Office of T-Systems International. In her role, she drives strategic AI initiatives and connects technical innovation with business value. In this interview, she shares how AI is shaping T-Systems’ strategy – and how to build trust, infrastructure, and resilience in the age of applied intelligence.

1. How do Artificial Intelligence influence your company’s strategy for driving digital transformation and innovation? 

AI sits at the core our strategy at T-Systems, as we are part of Deutsche Telekom. We see AI as an accelerator – for our own growth, but also for our customers. 

For ourselves, we use AI along the value chain, for example our software developers are up to 20% more productive as they use our AI Engineer. 

For our customers, AI can accelerate the digital transformation, but also open new business models and enable innovative products. 

The true potential unfolds when AI solutions are grounded on a solid foundation: an AI-ready network and infrastructure that can handle the demands of training and real-time inference, and high-quality, well-organized data that’s been cleansed, catalogued, and made instantly available wherever your models need it. 

When you have those pillars in place, AI isn’t just another project – it becomes the gateway to a much more comprehensive digital transformation, and once you’re through that door it immediately kicks your innovation and efficiency into overdrive. 

2. What are the main challenges you encounter when integrating AI in your solutions, and how do you overcome them?

There are four key challenges in AI adoption. First, technology and data readiness: you need an infrastructure that can support AI workloads and high-quality, well-organized data that’s immediately “AI-ready.” Second, the shortage of AI expertise and the cultural resistance to change can stall even the most promising projects. Third, it’s all too easy to chase the latest hype without a clear strategy—so initiatives must be tightly aligned with your company’s strategic goals and focused on the use cases with the greatest ROI. Finally, navigating the rapidly evolving regulatory landscape – most notably the EU AI Act – means ensuring compliance, transparency, and safety across every solution. 

We address each of these challenges through our end-to-end services: from AI-maturity assessments and hands-on exploration workshops to advisory on infrastructure, data services, and bespoke solution development, all the way through seamless operations and system integration. With security baked into every layer and data sovereignty as a core principle, we turn AI into a reliable, value-driving engine for businesses. 

3. How do you ensure the security and trustworthiness of your AI solutions, particularly regarding data protection?

Security doesn’t begin with the application – it starts with Deutsche Telekom’s resilient, secure networks and T-Systems’ Security Operations Centers and sovereign cloud offerings (e.g. Europe’s 26×-certified leading sovereign public cloud „Open Telekom Cloud“). 

AI solutions embed privacy-by-design at every step: 

customer data resides in isolated, dedicated tenants and is encrypted in transit and at rest; we never use customer inputs to retrain shared models; we apply reversible pseudonymization and irreversible anonymization; enforce granular role-based access controls; and conduct regular GDPR and privacy-regulation audits. 

Beyond that, we actively participate in European Data Spaces such as Catena-X for decentralized, secure data exchange, and we champion privacy-preserving digital identities like the EU Digital Identity Wallet, e.g. to authenticate attributes (e.g., „over 18“) without revealing underlying personal data. 

But data protection is just the start: AI safety also means responsible and ethical usage of AI which we ensure through our digital ethics review against nine binding AI ethics principles. We safeguard state-of-the-art LLMs from untrusted sources using topic bans and guardrails ensuring full compliance with the EU AI Act but also with corporate interests of our customers. 

📍 Read more about T-Systems’ AI approach