Zsolt Winkler

Zsolt Winkler is Senior AI Manager at Veolia, working on how AI gets adopted inside a large organisation. He sees AI not as a replacement but as an extension — a partner that has to be led, and whose output always has to be checked: human in the loop. What interests him is how processes become better and AI-supported — and how that makes people's days better. That view took more than 25 years to form. He began in 1999 in PC support at T-Mobile and joined the team behind the world-premiere MMS launch, later moving to Magyar Telekom's strategy department. From 2010 to 2016 he was managing director of Kitchen Budapest — KIBU, Magyar Telekom's multifunctional innovation lab, and from 2012 one of the first in Hungary to incubate startups. He went on to lead KPMG Hungary's Telco, Media and Technology advisory practice, MOL Group's Open Innovation Hub, and digital product design at Telenor. Different industries, the same job every time: introduce a new technology, a new solution, in a way that people can adopt easily and genuinely benefit from. Today he builds tools with AI that would once have required a development team — and for which, in his view, the entry ticket is not technical knowledge alone but structured thinking as well. AI is at its strongest, he argues, where it clears away the repetitive work that eats the day and leaves no room for creativity: an idea becomes a working prototype in hours rather than months, and what comes back is the one thing nobody has enough of — time to think.