Twenty years in AI, three chairs.

I wanted to save the world. That is why I got into AI – some twenty years ago, back when saying “I do AI” at a party earned you roughly the same look as “I collect medieval locks” (or old Atari computers, for that matter). I studied cybernetics and control engineering and finished with a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence – and then added a master’s in philosophy, because the interesting questions kept leaking out of the equations. I led the Department of Man-Machine Interaction at the University of West Bohemia, and I spent a short time at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, where I learned that thinking seriously about where AI is going is a full-time job in itself.

In 2015 I traded the lab for the corporate engine room: Chief Data Scientist at O2 Czech Republic, later founder and director of Dataclair.ai, the AI Centre of O2 and the PPF Group – a team of forty doing real machine learning on real problems with real deadlines. Seven years there taught me more about why AI initiatives succeed or fail than any paper ever could.

Then I did the thing you should never do calmly: I started a startup. I built Elin.ai, an AI companion protecting young people’s minds on social media, and I am currently exiting it. Building, running, funding and handing over an AI company completed the set – I have now seen AI from the lab, the boardroom and the founder’s chair.

Today I work independently as an AI Strategist & Executive Advisor: workshops, keynotes and advisory sparring for people making high-stakes AI decisions, with a safety and governance lens I have carried since long before it was fashionable. My current frontier is agentic safety – what it actually takes to deploy autonomous AI in a company without regretting it.

Away from all this I am a runner, a PADI divemaster, a private pilot, a philosopher and a lifelong Atari enthusiast. Most of these help with the AI work. The Atari helps differently: it reminds me that every technology was once the future – and it anchors my case for slow technology, the kind we really controlled, and not the other way around.

Credentials

Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence · M.Sc. in Cybernetics and Control Engineering · M.A. in Philosophy · former head of the Department of Man-Machine Interaction, University of West Bohemia · academic visit to the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford · Czech AI Personality of the Year 2024 · AI Personality 2025 (Security category) · Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Czech AI Association · organizer of the Prague AI Safety Meetup since 2018 · led a research group at the National Institute of Mental Health · signatory of the FLI and safe.ai statements on AI risk.

Pro bono

I give roughly one free talk a month to schools, nonprofits and social-impact organizations – ask. Two causes have my long-term commitment: palliative care – I serve on the board of Dialogus, and I spoke on AGI and palliative care at the EAPC 2025 congress in Helsinki – and AI alignment, the work of minimizing existential risks from advanced AI.