Sebastian Kister – World Champion Entrepreneur, Cloud Pioneer & “People-First Transformation” Leader
Sebastian Kister is a world champion entrepreneur and one of the leading minds in cloud platforms, agentic operations, and cultural transformation within international enterprises. As a multi-award-winning IT visionary, he has spent over a decade shaping the path of large organizations towards a future-proof, people-centered technology landscape.
In his current role as Multiple Team Lead in the automotive industry, he is responsible for operating and advancing mission-critical cloud platforms in Germany and Hungary – and was the first to implement a production-ready Agentic AI Operations Architecture in an enterprise environment. This breakthrough is a game changer, redefining how IT architecture is conceived.
Previously, Kister built a Container Competence Center & Platform ecosystem from scratch into an internationally recognized center of excellence. His credo:
“People first – then tools, then processes.”
With this approach, Sebastian Kister dramatically accelerated time-to-market cycles, earning the Digital Leader Award 2021 and the Outstanding Leadership Award 2022.
Sebastian Kister Lecture topics
- Human (R)evolution! – Agentic Native Platform Engineering and people-first transformation
- Don’t fight the silo! – a hands-on session on how to create end-2-end value streams in enterprises.
- There is no greenfield! – escaping reorganization and cultivating a transformative momentum.
- The DevOps legacy! – about Agentic AI Operations and platform engineering.
- There is no change without a business case! – about implementing sustainable change in enterprises.
- Transformation is a mindset, not a project!– about people, tools and processes.
- Time 2 Market and Cost of Delay by Security-First-Culture – platform engineering for C-Level.
- AI doesn’t take your job; people using AI will. – about the people-first-transformation enablers and AI Operations
As an active figure in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the Linux Foundation, Kister operates at the very intersection of the trillion-dollar hardware and software markets. His work helps define the open source standards and technologies that form the backbone of the digital world – making computing power truly consumable, scalable, and sustainable.
He stands for the democratization of these key technologies, inspiring and convincing leaders in politics, industry, and SMEs alike. At the forefront of global innovation, he actively shapes the technology trends of tomorrow from day one.
Kister is also a successful entrepreneur, recently awarded with the prestigious “World Class Distillery” rating for his very own spirits brand – a mark of excellence placing him among the top distillers worldwide. As an investor and analyst in the venture capital space, he anticipates which technological landscapes will define the future, leveraging his unique foresight to guide strategic investments.
If you take a closer look at Sebastian Kister, you will learn some amazing things about this successful techie. Even before his career in IT, Kister was travelling internationally – as a long-haired musician on world and European tours with several bands.
He found his way into technology through his master’s thesis on ‘Indoctrination and Propaganda in Totalitarian Systems’ and his first start-up for privacy-by-design data infrastructures with the mission of providing data protection-compliant systems against total surveillance – later sold to TÜV Süd. He then went on to oversee the development and scaling of apps at waipu.tv and its white label solution O2.tv, from the first customers to over 1.25 million users – before this business was also successfully sold to Freenet.
On international stages – from Athens to Boston, from KubeCon to the Red Hat Summit – he inspires thousands of listeners each year with clear visions, real-world success stories, and the conviction that true transformation always starts with people.