Elena Hammes
Zurich · Open to conversations

AI ambition,
well governed.

I’m Elena — Senior AI Consultant at Adnovum in Zurich. I help banks, insurers and public institutions turn AI ambition into trusted, well-governed change: structured delivery, clear ownership, and governance that scales adoption instead of slowing it down.

47.37°N 8.54°ESenior AI Consultant · AdnovumDE · EN
27
Projects delivered
6
Years in delivery
15+
People led
3
Regulated sectors
02 — Approach
Governance is not a brake. It is the foundation for scaling AI with trust — without turning innovation into a paperwork exercise.
01

Only permitted content enters the system

What the AI can see is decided before the first prompt — not discovered after the first incident.

02

Users access only what they are entitled to

Entitlements carry over. An AI assistant is never a side door around existing permissions.

03

Every statement stays traceable to its source

If an answer can't point back to where it came from, it doesn't belong in a regulated decision.

04

The decision stays with the human

AI informs. People decide. Accountability is a feature, not a constraint.

When it’s time to take AI governance seriously
SIG_1Nobody knows exactly who is using which AI tools.
SIG_2AI lands in processes without clear ownership.
SIG_3Questions on data protection go unanswered.

If any of these sound familiar, you are not behind — you are exactly where most organizations are. The difference is what happens next: structure, transparency, and clear ownership.

03 — Selected work
All 27 projects ↗
01AI Research Assistant & Governance DesignDiscovery and governance design for an AI research assistant across investment teams — interviews from Fixed Income to Convertible Bonds, distilled into a governance-by-design architecture and a grounded build-vs-vendor decision.Swiss asset management · 2026AI GovernanceDiscovery02AI Governance for an AI-Driven OrganizationCo-led the governance stream extending AI beyond engineering to the whole organization. Trustworthy AI principles along the seven EU HLEG requirements, an AI inventory to surface shadow AI, and minimum viable governance — only as much process as adoption needs.Adnovum · 2026AI StrategyChange03AI Governance Practice & OfferingBuilt AI governance as an internal practice and a client-facing offering for regulated Swiss industries — anchored in the EU AI Act, FINMA guidance and revDSG, grounded in a need-finding study, and taken to market with webinars, content and a self-assessment.Adnovum · 2026Go-to-MarketAI Governance04AI Agent Development with MicrosoftDesigned and built autonomous agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio — reasoning over internal data, triggering actions through APIs, and orchestrating multi-step workflows across Microsoft 365 and third-party systems.Microsoft collaboration · 2025AI AgentsCopilot Studio05AI Chatbot DevelopmentPMO and product management for an AI chatbot at a major statutory health insurer — requirements, epics and user stories, change management and employee training that carried the solution from development into daily use.German health insurance · 2025ProductChange06Pursuit Lead — AI Chatbot for IT ServicesLed a public-tender pursuit end to end for an LLM-based service-desk chatbot: solution strategy, pricing, healthcare-grade compliance, and a multidisciplinary team of AI specialists and public-sector experts.German medical services · 2025Public SectorTender07Intelligent PMO AssistantDesigned and shipped a PMO assistant on Microsoft Power Automate — status reporting, meeting documentation and task tracking automated across Teams and SharePoint, with onboarding and training for lasting adoption.Global lubricant manufacturer · 2025AutomationPMO
04 — Experience
2026 — NOW

Adnovum

Senior AI Consultant · Key Account Manager · Zurich

Leading client projects on value-driven AI strategy and enterprise-grade AI solutions for the regulated sector — aligning business, IT, legal and compliance from first concept to measurable impact.

2023 — 2025

EY

Senior Consultant, Transformation Delivery · Germany

Digital transformation across regulated and infrastructure-heavy sectors — statutory health insurance, fibre-optic expansion, defence — from planning through delivery in complex multi-stakeholder environments.

2021 — 2023

IBM iX

Project Lead · Berlin

Led digital initiatives with a focus on AI solution development — full lifecycles from strategy to delivery, with budgets, risk and compliance under one roof.

MA Media Science — TU BerlinPRINCE2 7 PractitionerPSPO ICertified ScrumMaster
05 — Off the project plan

I train teams in Scrum, project management, design thinking and AI, and I speak at industry events and webinars on practical AI governance — most recently on the warning signs that it’s time to actively steer how your organization uses AI. Complexity is fine. Lack of clarity isn’t.

Let’s talk.

Working on AI in a regulated environment — or wondering whether you should be? I’m always up for a good conversation.