An AI startup, Urs Merkel is his name. He's the founder and chief technology officer of

Match Manau, a startup that uses AI to optimize personality and team development. And we definitely

all want to hear that. So I hope that Urs Merkel is already online joining us, ready to jump. Here he is.

Urs, we're all ears. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for hosting me.

So we'll start my screen sharing for you now.

And if technology does what it should, that looks good. Cool. So it's a pleasure to be here as one

of the first sort of startups in Nuremberg and talking about our vision and what we are actually

doing. And as you can imagine, as a founder, you are always looking for a challenge, a problem to

solve to get your head around. And with my co-founder, Alexandra, we had the challenge we

wanted to solve right in front of us. And this challenge could be easily framed with sentences

like, oh boy, Mondays suck. Or even more detailed, my colleagues are so annoying. And the last one we

once heard, and everyone out there might also have heard it already, I fucking hate my job.

So how can it be that we have this kind of relationship and attitude to something we spend

most of our lifetime with? And this was one of the reasons why we as founders said to ourselves,

we need to do something about it and we need to improve the way humans work together. Because

it cannot be that in this time we are still challenging or faced with those challenges

we have in our workplaces based on human relationships. Because when we look at projects,

most of the projects fail because of envy, sensibilities, or other neuroticism.

And when we look at new work or just work, how we approach it, it's always about human relationships

and when we narrow it down with all the AI in it, and it's not a subsidy that we talk about AI

when it comes to human relationship in new work to support improving our human relationships in

our work culture. So at Metschmanau, what we did, we put this whole thing into a machine learning

framework where we approached it by analyzing people based on their personality psychometrics.

And we were not only focusing on one model like we need to identify personality, but we were

starting to collect different models like personality, work style, value systems,

the way of communication and team role allocations to give people the chance to state actually,

this is the way I want to work. To give people a tool to stand up and say, this is the way I want

to communicate, this is the way where I'm best placed at a team role, these are my values and

this is the way I work. And with respect to that, when it comes to our team design, we analyzing

how many people or which people can we allocate and fit together so that the career,

here in diversity in it fits best and always with a focus on collective intelligence so that people

are enabled to solve the conflict with our focusing outcome on improving team satisfaction and team

performance. Because many studies out there have shown that there is a direct correlation in long

term with satisfaction and performance. How we do this currently, by asking the right questions.

So to identify personalities, for example, and we shrink it down to a simple approach on our platform

that we structured in four categories, where we would like you to give the science, the data

science behind your gut feelings currently. And we heard previously about gut feelings in

recruiting and stuff. And we do not want to build a tool who makes the decision, but who

fosters and enables people in decision making. This we approach by giving an anonymous

insight where you can reflect yourself compared to your team. And with all the analysis, it wouldn't

be finished because we said analysis is one part of it, but people need to have clear recommendations

for action so that you, besides the analysis, are clearly advised what we would suggest that you take

as the next step to improve the situation. When we come to team roles, we analyze from our approach

and our understanding if you cover all types of team role members, which we understand that you need

for a heterogeneous team. And we give you the insights that you can easily understand where

you have overlapping team roles, which team roles are missing. Because what we found out is that when

you have too many of one of a kind, there is starting inner team conflicts based on the roles,

which always also depends on the project type. But at the end, you get this understanding that

you know which team roles are there and which you should get on board. And this is closely

connected from our stance with the value systems. When you remember maybe some