Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?

This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.

Julian Schirmer is the co-founder of OAO. He works with companies like Sanofi, AXA, and Henkel on AI-driven transformation. He's half German, half French, married to a Spaniard. And he’s tired of hearing Americans say "I'm sorry you come from Europe."

His starting point is brutal: McKinsey says you need 30% employee participation for a transformation to succeed. Most companies are at 2%. Below 7%, you're burning capital.

We talk about why European firms keep defaulting to caution, what happens when AI adoption runs ahead of governance (BCG has 33,000 agents globally; Sanofi had 11), what an "agentic nervous system" actually looks like inside a large organization, and whether Europe's instinct for regulation (the same instinct that produced GDPR) might be an underpriced asset in a world where Silicon Valley's political alignments can shift overnight.

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