About
Stefan Ojanen
AI product leader, builder and speaker in Berlin. On 15 October 2026 I start as AI Solution Owner at Focused Energy, which is developing laser-driven fusion power.
I started in bank risk and credit, building ML scoring pipelines and automating lending decisions inside regulated FinTechs and at Danske Bank, where I learned that in finance the model is the easy part. Getting it past risk, compliance and audit is the real work.
From there I led AI product at Scorable (explainable AI, acquired), scaled Germany's first AI cloud platform at Genesis Cloud, and ran enterprise AI transformation at Ringier worth around a million Swiss francs a year. I still build hands-on: my own research-grade platform, ProtocolEngine, runs eleven specialised AI agents in production.
Alongside the work I run the Berlin chapter of the Agentic AI Foundation, keep building in the open, and speak at conferences about solving real problems using AI.
Experience
Where I have done the work.
From Oct 2026
2022 – 2026
AI Product & Strategy Consultant
Freelance · Berlin, Germany
Product leadership, strategic advisory, and hands-on technical delivery for AI initiatives.
- AI Product Lead, Ringier AG (2024–2025): Led enterprise AI transformation across 10+ publications, reporting directly to the Group CPO. Delivered ~1M CHF annual value through content automation recovering 20,000+ journalist hours yearly (~12 FTE equivalent).
- AI Forge: 380K+ AI-assisted content events/year across 5 use cases (title/articles generation, translations, summaries, transcriptions). 700K CHF/year from article automation, 280K CHF/year from transcription savings. Designed and implemented the LLM evaluation suite benchmarking OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models on Palantir AIP; rewrote the full prompt library for improved performance and instruction adherence. Redesigned MLOps setup on SageMaker. Integrated DeepL into this AI suite.
- AI enablement & adoption: Trained journalists on AI tooling and structured tool evaluation, including golden-dataset collection and quality feedback on AI outputs, turning newsroom users into the evaluation loop.
- Group scaling strategy: Delivered build-vs-buy analysis and recommendation to the Group CPO for scaling RAG chatbots across 100+ Ringier publications.
- RAG Assistant Chatbot: Session Duration +39%, Pageviews/Session +35%, deployed to 2M+ monthly users.
- AI Agent for JIRA Task Management: Joins meetings, transcribes, creates/updates tickets with full workflow context (projects, labels). RAG enabled for rigorous context management. Saves ~30 minutes of product-management work per meeting; selected meetings now run without a PM present.
- Other projects: “Listen to articles” TTS (ElevenLabs, BeyondWords), automated ad floor price optimization system (pilot).
- Global Tier 1 consulting firm (2023): Consulting on Semiconductors/Chips for Generative AI.
- Product & Delivery Advisor, confidential client (2026): Scoped a usage-to-billing integration (SAP Subscription Billing) and its reconciliation controls for an Agentic AI SaaS, built the delivery effort-and-cost estimation model (PERT / reference-class), and coached product-manager candidates for the delivery pod.
- Investment advisory: Recommended maximum vesting on Groq (SAFE) - Net MOIC 4.02x in 19m, IRR 117% post-carry. Other notable cases: Replit (Series D), Together AI (SAFE), and Galaxia AI.
- Advisory CTO, AI-as-a-Service Trading Platform (2024–2026): Product strategy, proprietary AI model development (Transformer, Mamba), trading system design, staffing, go-to-market planning.
- Conversational Voice AI Agent (2023): Full outbound call-centre replacement for political surveying and donation collection: millions of contacts reached across Australia, with donation cost-efficiency surpassing human callers by multiples. Designed system architecture (DialogFlow CX), team build-out, TTS performance tuning.
2021 – 2024
Director of Product Management
Genesis Cloud · Munich, Germany
Germany’s first AI-focused cloud infrastructure platform.
2019 – 2020
Senior Product Owner
Scorable (exit via acquisition by BondIT) · Berlin, Germany
Explainable AI for asset management. Corporate venture by Ampega Group.
2018 – 2019
Chief Analyst / Product Owner
Danske Bank · Copenhagen, Denmark
Founding member “North Star” Agile lab, Asset Finance’s #1 strategic initiative.
2016 – 2018
Senior Consultant
Danske Bank · Helsinki, Finland
FinTech for Retail & SME banking.
2013 – 2016
Senior Risk Analyst · Risk Analyst
Mash Group (exit ~€400M+) · Helsinki, Finland
FinTech, fully automated consumer lending.
2012
Economist (Intern)
Economic Associates · Brisbane, Australia
In their words
“Stefan is one of the brightest guys I've worked with. He went often beyond his role as product manager to also get his hands dirty in operations and architecture, and took on communicating complex and sometimes difficult messages to executives, and orchestrating complex operations, often dealing with compliance, with stakeholders across multiple organizations.”
“Stefan is an expert in Artificial Intelligence and High-Performance Computing, and a remarkable professional. His expertise spanned both software and hardware, going way beyond the level of depth I would typically expect from a Product Manager. He was always reliable, consistently meeting our milestones, and I genuinely enjoyed working with Stefan and his team.”
Capabilities
The specifics.
Not a wall of dots. The gaps are the point. Specific systems I've shipped, and where: AML/KYC in banking, custom Transformer/Mamba in trading, the agentic RAG stack in my own R&D.
GenAI & agents
LLM fine-tuning & custom architectures
Custom Transformer / Mamba · OSS fine-tuning
RAG & retrieval systems
RAG assistant chatbot (2M+ users) · research-grade RAG
Agentic orchestration
Meeting + JIRA agent · agentic dev & ops
Embeddings & vector DBs
pgvector · HNSW
Data science & modelling
ML credit scoring & risk models
Automated credit decisions
Time-series forecasting
Price prediction · trading signals
Predictive & stochastic modelling
IFRS 9 · CLV · credit-loss provisioning
Knowledge graphs
Deterministic information processing
Data & ML infrastructure
Data engineering & pipelines
Bank-grade data infrastructure
MLOps
SageMaker · Vertex · ClearML
GPU & distributed training
H100 · Gaudi2 · multi-GPU
Regulated & risk
AML/KYC & on-boarding automation
90%+ automation, retail & SME lending
GDPR & data governance
Built GDPR-compliant systems before GDPR went live (e.g. banking data mart)
Model risk, audit & risk-aware execution
Risk analysis & management reporting to the board
Education
Credentials.
2026
Certificate Program in Agentic AI
Johns Hopkins University
2022
Product Leader Certification™
Product School
2019
MBA Essentials
London School of Economics
2014
Certified Expert in Risk Management
Frankfurt School of Finance & Management
2011 – 2013
B.Com. in Finance and Economics
Griffith University, Australia · Griffith Award for Academic Excellence (top 5%) & graduated in 2.5 years
Teams & culture
The capability has to outlast me.
The fastest way to waste an AI investment is to make it depend on one person. I build high-performing teams and the culture that keeps them shipping, so the capability outlasts any one of us, including me.
- Helped build the culture behind Genesis Cloud's #6 ranking among Top German Startup Employers
- Hired and coached product and data-science teams across four companies
