Bernard Kirsch

Illustration: The Aiomic Age. Created with AI.

The conversation

Bernard Kirsch brings the perspective of a corporate buyer and an angel investor. Tech Tour lists him as Head of Data Privacy at L’Oréal. In this conversation with entrepreneur Sven Jungmann in Berlin, he discusses AI’s business value, the skills employees need and the choices Europe faces over technology dependence.

Our reading

The useful starting point is the dependency map. At 12:36, Kirsch argues that boards often lack a clear view of which suppliers their critical processes rely on. Our reading is that a sovereignty strategy should begin with a practical exercise: identify what would stop working, what an alternative would cost and how long a switch would take. That makes the case for paying more for an alternative easier to assess.

His discussion of governance follows the same logic. At 08:06, he puts business value, risk assessment and mitigation into the same decision. This gives an organisation a basis for proceeding while rules continue to develop. The test is whether the decision can be explained and audited, with a clear account of the risks that remain.

The harder question comes at 18:12: will customers pay? Kirsch argues that European suppliers need commercial demand to survive beyond public support. We would judge progress by whether organisations buy and renew services that reduce a dependence they have identified. A supplier’s European address is only the beginning of that assessment. Its reliability, performance and ability to keep serving customers still need to be demonstrated.

Chapters

• 00:00 — Bernard’s corporate and investment roles
• 01:34 — AI creates opportunities for revenue growth
• 03:55 — Workers need plans to build AI skills
• 06:08 — Assessing AI value and risk together
• 09:16 — Clearer rules and auditable decisions
• 11:25 — Mapping Europe’s technology dependencies
• 14:12 — Choosing where European alternatives matter
• 17:45 — European suppliers need paying customers
• 18:54 — Changing jobs and the AI skills shortage

Source notes

At 00:29 and 03:04, the conversation uses rounded company figures. L’Oréal’s 2025 annual results report €44.05 billion in sales and e-commerce above 30%. E-commerce includes online retail partners as well as the company’s own websites, so it is broader than direct-to-consumer sales. The recording does not specify the currency or period behind the 50 billion figure. We have not verified the historical 1% figure or the 50% target for 2030 mentioned at 03:12.

The broad dependency estimates at 15:26 also need care. Asterès’s April 2025 study for Cigref estimates that US suppliers receive 83% of European business software and cloud spending. That measure does not establish the interview’s broader estimates for digital services or industrial dependence on China. The 10% figure at 16:59 describes Kirsch’s company’s internal assessment; it has not been independently verified and is not a general threshold for sensitive data.

The regulatory texts discussed are the EU AI Act and the General Data Protection Regulation. The recording does not identify the service interruption mentioned at 12:13 or the resilience index at 13:07 precisely enough for us to confirm the intended references.

Disclosure

At 06:16, Sven Jungmann says his business sells to large organisations and works with health data. Kirsch describes his corporate role and angel investments at 00:21–01:17.