About Katja

For most of her thirty-year career, Katja worked on how humans experience businesses: design, customer experience, insight, trust. Since 2017, she has been tracking what happens when the customer stops being human: when AI agents, autonomous procurement systems and logic-driven platforms become buyers, negotiators and payers in their own right. She wrote the practitioner's book on it before most boards had the topic on an agenda.

Her work now operates at the level where that shift actually bites: business models, pricing power, governance, and the question of who sets the terms of an economy with a non-human layer. She is the author of Machine Customers: The Evolution Has Begun, endorsed by leaders at Gartner, Salesforce and across the CX field. She advised Forrester on agentic commerce, is featured in its recent report on AI agents as customers, and her thinking has appeared on conference main stages internationally.

What makes her perspective unusual is that it's earned in the field, not assembled from analyst reports. She has sat on both sides of the commercial equation: inside a global bank, leading Standard Chartered's client experience and establishing its AI governance frameworks, and as a founder who built and sold her own consultancy. And she goes where the machine economy is being built: most recently on delegation in China, sitting with Alibaba, Tencent, Unitree Robotics and BYD as they assembled it in real time.

Katja is based on a rural property in Orange, Australia, and works globally: on stages, in boardrooms, and occasionally in ports and robotics labs. Her second book, on what becomes possible when AI stops being a cost-saving tool and starts being an economic actor, is in development.