Karsten Wildberger

Karsten Wildberger became the central figure in a landmark European AI consolidation story when, as CEO of Schwarz Group, he drove the company's involvement in merger talks between Aleph Alpha and Cohere. The proposed merger — first reported by Handelsblatt in early 2025 — would combine Germany's most strategically significant AI company with a leading Canadian-founded enterprise AI provider, creating a potential European AI champion with the scale to compete against OpenAI's enterprise business. Wildberger's support for the deal reflected Schwarz Group's existing investment in both companies and its commitment to sovereign European AI for its retail and logistics operations.

Wildberger has served as CEO of Schwarz Group since 2022, leading the world's third-largest retailer — the parent of Lidl and Kaufland — through an aggressive technology transformation. Before Schwarz, he was a senior partner at McKinsey and held executive roles at several European companies. Under his leadership, Schwarz Group established STACKIT, an in-house cloud infrastructure business, and made strategic AI investments including in Aleph Alpha, signalling an unusually sophisticated technology strategy for a traditional retail conglomerate.

Wildberger's push for a European AI champion through the Cohere-Aleph Alpha merger is driven by both commercial and sovereignty rationale. Schwarz Group's supply-chain, pricing, and customer analytics require AI at scale, and Wildberger has publicly argued that European enterprises cannot outsource that capability to US providers subject to CLOUD Act jurisdiction. The merger talks, if completed, would create a rare European AI company with genuine enterprise product revenue and the technical depth to compete for the largest GPAI deployments.