Michael Ikemann
Head of Data & AI
Michael Ikemann is Head of Data & AI at Lechler GmbH, where he integrates AI, agentic systems, and data engineering into a 145-year-old industrial company. With over 25 years of experience in software engineering, his expertise spans computer vision, deep learning, autonomous systems, and agentic AI architectures. Before joining Lechler, he spent five years as Lead Data Scientist at Zühlke Group. Michael is passionate about bringing agentic AI from research into production — building systems that don't just analyze data but autonomously reason, plan, and act in complex enterprise environments.
09:15 - 10:00
Roundtable
Wed, March 25
Controlled Autonomy: How AI Coding Assistants 10x Product Development Productivity
AI coding agents promise to transform software development and the way we work with data — but most teams are still figuring out how to move beyond the hype and make them work in real, structured workflows.
This roundtable draws on hands-on experience running a complete development cycle with AI agents at Lechler, within an international team of data scientists. Rather than using a single assistant, the approach relies on multiple specialized agents working in parallel — each with a distinct responsibility: from user story refinement and code generation to code review and QA — orchestrated by a single developer operating as senior dev, Scrum Master and project manager in one.
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