Using the Data & AI Business Design method, you achieve your goals securely and find the right path more quickly. This method helps you and your team collaborate efficiently and effectively to design both unique and high-impact strategies for utilizing your enterprise data and integrating analytics and AI in a sustainable way.
Datentreiber’s Data & AI Business Design method applies core principles from Design Thinking—like empathizing with users, systematically framing challenges, and co-creating solutions—— while incorporating business viability, data feasibility, and value realization. This approach ensures that every data & AI initiative is both user-centered and grounded in the real-world possibilities of the organization’s data and technical landscape.
The Datentreiber method relies on a carefully designed set of canvases to help teams identify promising use cases, evaluate potential risks and benefits, and plan how analytics and AI can integrate into daily operations. This integration of user-centric creativity and data-driven practicality forms a holistic framework that aligns business objectives, user needs, and data capabilities, resulting in relevant, actionable, and transformative strategies.
A data & AI strategy is a dynamic plan that positions data & AI as essential elements at the core of your entire business. At the same time a holistic data & AI strategy guides how your organization adopts and scales data-driven capabilities across near-term opportunities, mid-range growth, and future transformation.
Within Datentreiber’s Data & AI Business Design method, this strategy is designed and implemented within our three-staged process that guides your ongoing organizational transformation:
train.
Here your organization cultivates the mindset, skills, and shared understanding needed to leverage data & AI effectively.
think.
Focuses on designing, shaping and refining how data & AI fit into your business model, so they fuel innovation and align with strategic objectives.
transform.
Embeds data & AI-driven insights and processes into daily operations, ensuring they adapt and evolve with your business.
These stages complement a structured progression that helps integrate data & AI holistically—while setting the best foundation for an integrated data & AI strategy with clearly defined short-, mid-, and long-term goals to impact.
Central to the Data & AI Business Design method is a suite of Datentreiber Canvas that help teams explore all angles of data & AI—from identifying new use cases to analyzing feasibility and planning governance. Each canvas can be used individually to tackle a focused challenge (like prioritizing a single use case), or in synergy to design a holistic data & AI strategy.
Together 21 canvases constitute the Data & AI Design Kit
Datentreiber shares these canvases free of charge under a Creative Commons license, believing that accessible tools foster better collaboration across organizations.
When the Data & AI Design Kit is applied as part of the Data & AI Business Design method the canvases can reveal their synergetic impact—woven into carefully structured workshops, guided by a clear roadmap, and aligned with your broader strategic goals.
The Data & AI Design Bench unites all Datentreiber canvases and workshop formats into a single, user-friendly virtual hub. Rather than forcing you to piece together scattered tools, the Bench outlines design patterns and processes that address typical data & AI starting points:
All beginnings are…easy, especially with clear guidance. Datentreiber offers multiple entry points to kick off your Data & AI Business Design journey:
“Datentreiber enabled us to bridge the gap between our objectives, our content, and our data. Together with Martin Szugat, we developed a universal toolkit and methodology that finally allowed us to correlate all our key metrics and data points. This was our long-missing link. Martin Szugat provided invaluable support with his extensive experience and expertise, giving us the right impulses for independent work.”
Malte Blumberg
Team Technology & Design
funk – the content network of ARD and ZDF
“Georg Arens supported us in developing our comprehensive data strategy. His expertise and methodical approach provided us with valuable impulses that enabled us, from both a product and business perspective, to identify the key drivers and use cases and to develop a data business case. We look forward to further collaboration.”
Sven Scheffler
COO
Ströer Content Group GmbH
“WDR has repeatedly conducted multi‑day data strategy workshops with Martin Szugat. He impresses with his methodical competence, his extensive experience from numerous projects, and his engaging way of conveying knowledge. The well‑thought‑out methodological concepts, the practical applicability, and not least the provision of toolkits significantly contribute to developing and establishing internal processes and products.”
Thorsten Müller
Project Manager
WDR Media Research
“Georg Arens accompanied us as a workshop moderator in the conception of the market launch of our Smart Data products. During the workshops, he methodically guided us toward a stronger integration of the user perspective with the technical aspects of data analysis. This helped us translate our Smart Data approaches more precisely into customer solutions and improve our market processing procedures.”
Tobias Becker
Head of Smart Analytics
VR Smart Finanz AG
“Datentreiber helped us to plan, optimize, and systematically evaluate a data‑driven advertising campaign. In the process, we learned a great deal about data‑driven approaches and analytical tools. Ultimately, we gained valuable insights from the campaign analysis and heightened our data awareness. The collaboration with Martin Szugat is both partnership‑oriented and goal‑driven.”
Jutta Hasenclever
Head of Media Sales
Sparkasse Oberland
“Since the beginning of the relaunch process for our digital platform, Datentreiber has accompanied us in developing and implementing a data strategy. The goal is to not only gain deeper insights from our existing data, but also to deploy them in a targeted, data‑driven manner for managing our platform. The workshops conducted by Georg Arens as part of the project have already provided valuable impulses for this purpose.”
Benjamin Dörich
Sales Director
SevenOne Media GmbH
“As specialists in customer analytics, we support our clients in generating valuable insights from data. In a two‑day workshop, Martin Szugat explained his methods and models to our team. The canvas method is an excellent addition for integrating design thinking into our consulting approach.”
Cecilia Floridi
Managing Director
DataLab. GmbH
“Martin Szugat enriched our team in small‑group workshops on data strategy design with valuable insights. The knowledge he conveyed could then be directly translated into our daily project work and has since made it easier for our colleagues to adopt data‑driven perspectives.”
Oliver Zehn
Director Digital Analytics
Virtual Identity AG
“The workshop day with Datentreiber was an absolute gain for all employees in our agency. The numerous insights and perspectives on digital and social topics prompted us to reconsider our views and have sustainably increased our data awareness.”
Tobias Spörer
Managing Director
elbkind GmbH
Are you wondering if we are the right match for your data & AI strategy needs?
Schedule a brief call with Georg Arens, Managing Director at Datentreiber. He will provide valuable insights and help you decide if we are the right fit.
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