Martin Wezowski

Martin Wezowski is Chief Designer and Futurist at SAP, working to build a future with humans and machines in tandem.

He believes the evolution of humanity is technology, a collaboration that will unveil possibilities in work and play that aren’t even on the horizon.

“The best things … are the things that make us smart,” Wezowski believes. “Systems that make us smarter is what I see fully established five to ten years from now. I call it the Humachine — a symbiosis between machine intelligence and human creativity.”

Wezowski was hired at the SAP Innovation Center to disrupt old processes and make that future happen. With his vibrantly rebellious attitude, he projects a force and intellect that has earned him accolades as a “software visionary”. He’s been named one of the 100 most innovative thinkers in Germany.

His mission is to explore emerging technology and harvest its value for business and society.

He’s moved from visual to system design and finally, design as a roadmap for the future. “Right now, I am on a mission to map, build and inspire a future we want to live in … to craft future outlooks, strategies and projects.”

Wezowski refined the role of a rebel as a young man. Born in Poland, he moved to Sweden at age 14 without knowing a word of the language. He studied construction engineering but started playing punk music instead.

The punk band was the real education, he now realizes. “Punk is all about disruption. You’re there to question the status quo,” he said. Punk is about new ideas and “celebration of the imperfect,” key qualities in innovation. To Wezowski, disruption means transforming at an ever-faster pace. It means creating connections to everything from products to social and political systems.

Machines can drive these quantum leaps by “pointing us to opportunities we cannot see,” he says. They will free humanity to achieve bigger dreams and higher purpose.

Human work should not be confined to filling in Excel tables, he laments. With the help of machines, “we may become humans at last,” Wezowski says. “We’ve been busy with something else so far.”

©Prophets of AI