Across Europe, an entire generation of experienced operators is heading into retirement, and the institutional knowledge they carry is walking out the door with them. Hiring replacements at scale is not realistic. Neither is asking the remaining workforce to absorb the load. The organizations that sustain and grow operational capacity through this shift will be the ones that move beyond traditional automation toward truly autonomous operations, where specialized AI agents handle end-to-end processes and humans focus on governance and decisions that require judgment.
That was the central argument Stefan Engl, CEO and Co-Founder of Otera (previously DeepOpinion), brought to a recent episode of the Der Digital-Stratege podcast, hosted by Mario Eckmaier. The conversation explored why the workforce gap cannot be closed with conventional tools and what a fundamentally different operating model looks like in practice.
"We want to free people from the repetitive, boring, recurring tasks and actually bring them up a level to the tasks where there is real value, where there are really decisions to be made. Every person has these abilities inherently and is actually a bit wasted in these recurring tasks." says Stefan Engl, CEO and Co-Founder of Otera.
Key Takeaways from the Conversation
• The workforce gap is structural, not cyclical.
Engl outlined why the retirement of the baby boomer generation creates an operational capacity problem that hiring alone cannot solve. Organizations need to rethink how work gets done, not just who does it.
• Automation that still depends on humans for every exception is not enough.
The discussion examined how traditional automation digitizes fragments of a process but still leaves humans to reconcile edge cases, stitch outputs, and chase exceptions. The process stays fundamentally manual.
• Autonomous operations change the equation.
Engl described a model in which specialized AI agents execute complex processes end-to-end, while humans set the rules and intervene only when genuine judgment is required. A real-world case study of delivery note processing illustrated how this works in production.
"I hope I was able to offer a few nebula words and you can all go out with more sight than you came in." - Stefan Engl, CEO and Co-Founder of Otera
About Otera
Otera brings autonomy to the operations the world depends on. We transform mission-critical processes into governed AI systems that decide and act end-to-end, freeing enterprises to grow without limits. Trusted by Allianz, Siemens, Bayer, SAAB, and Hannover Re.
Next Steps: From Insight to Action
Next Steps: From Insight to Action
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