Ann Cathrin Riedel is a driving force behind the digital future.
She is a journalist, digital expert and a leading voice on digital policy, administrative modernisation and democracy. As managing director of NExT e.V., a network dedicated to the digital transformation of public administration, she focuses on how the state and public administration can become more modern, efficient and digital. In this context, she views digitalisation not merely as a technological project, but as a key prerequisite for a sustainable society and stable democratic structures.
Previously, at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, she was responsible for issues relating to international digital policy, digitalisation and innovation. Furthermore, she has been actively involved in the debate on internet policy for many years, contributing her expertise to committees, discussions and conferences.
As a speaker, Ann Cathrin Riedel brings together political, social and technological perspectives. She demonstrates why digital transformation is, above all, a question of structures, responsibility and the political will to shape the future – and what companies and institutions can learn from this for their own future.
An interview with Ann Cathrin Riedel
1. What are the core subjects of your keynote speeches?
My talks revolve around a single question: how do states and companies stay capable of acting in a world where technology has become a resource of power?
Three areas follow from that.
First, the modernisation of the state – why the speed of public administration has long since shaped investment decisions, and what reforms actually founder on.
Second, digital sovereignty – which technological dependencies organisations have taken on over the past fifteen years, and which of them become dangerous when it matters.
And third, the geopolitics of digital infrastructure: semiconductors, data centres, submarine cables and standards have become instruments of state power. These three subjects belong together, because they describe the same shift viewed from different distances.
2. Which audiance or which branch do you reach with your speech?
My audience is broader than the subject might suggest: public administrations and public institutions, companies in industry, energy, finance and IT, industry associations and chambers of commerce and, within all of them, not only the people who already think about digitalisation, but also those who depend on it every day without ever engaging with it.
What connects these groups is the perspective I offer: a look at things so self-evidently present that no one examines them anymore. The internet feels as though it were suspended in the air – in fact it runs through cables in the ground and along the ocean floor. The cloud is not a weather phenomenon; it consists of data centres and contracts with very specific owners. And an authority that processes an application in two weeks rather than eight months changes more than an administrative procedure – it changes how people see their state. Creating that shift in perspective is the core of what I do: concrete, tangible and free of jargon.
3. Are you a PREMIUM SPEAKER? Where do you get your insights from?
From three vantage points that rarely meet.
As Managing Director of NExT e. V., I work every day with the people who actually modernise public administration – I do not observe the state, I work inside it. As an expert witness before the German Bundestag and state parliaments, and as a member of the German government’s advisory council on the implementation of the national digital strategy, I know the political side, where decisions are made. The international perspective comes from my time leading international digital policy at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, from conversations in countries from Kazakhstan to South Africa, and most recently from an invitation by the United Nations to New York. That I studied Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies alongside Political Science helps more than one might think: technology rarely explains itself in technical terms.
4. What will be in the future? Does «time» play an important role in your work?
My field looks like the fastest one there is, and that is precisely the misunderstanding. What decides matters in the end is slow: registries, contracts, data centres, cables across the Atlantic, semiconductor plants. A cloud decision made today binds an organisation for fifteen years. A chip fabrication plant takes half a decade before it delivers. The news cycle is frantic; the structures beneath it are stubborn – and the real competence lies in telling the two apart. Anyone who follows every wave of excitement misses the shifts that genuinely count. That is why my talks are almost never about the newest thing, but about the enduring one.
5. Tell us your life motto? What do you want to give your listeners to take with them?
Nothing about the digital world is a law of nature.
Every dependency we suffer from today was once a decision – usually a convenient one, often an unconscious one, but always one that somebody made. That is the uncomfortable and at the same time hopeful message: what was designed can be designed differently. So what I want to leave my audience with is not an alarm, but a demand – namely, ownership.
Thank you very much for the interview!