Bremen, October 8, 2026. A new phase is beginning at team neusta: As of October 1, founder and former CEO Carsten Meyer-Heder handed the reins to Markus Dietrich, who has been leading the Bremen-based group of companies ever since. Dietrich brings 19 years of experience in the digital agency industry. Most recently, he served as CEO of IBM iX, where he merged two organizations—each with approximately 500 employees—into a single unit and strategically realigned the company toward AI and future-oriented topics.
Dietrich is taking the helm at team neusta during a period of realignment. Together with its partner CONTACT Software, which acquired a majority stake at the turn of the year, the company is evolving from a traditional software and consulting firm into an AI-powered transformation partner that combines digital consulting, development, and operations. From his time at IBM iX, Dietrich knows team neusta as a strong competitor. “The technological foundation is there: 850 people who don’t just build what’s ordered, but understand why it’s needed. Our task is to turn that into consulting that starts with the customer’s question—not just with implementation,” says the 39-year-old. He wants to make this expertise more visible and position it even more clearly in the market.
From strategy to operations
Strategically, Dietrich aims to position team neusta more strongly in consulting and expand sales in targeted industries—an area he has been responsible for over many years in his previous roles. Simply developing software is no longer enough today. What’s needed are partners who can bring together strategy, technology, industry expertise, and transformation. The focus is therefore on AI transformation projects, in which Dietrich also intends to play an active role.
The key factor here is where AI actually makes a difference for a company. Through its consulting services, team neusta determines which projects make economic sense and under what conditions they operate—from data usage to legal requirements such as the EU AI Act. To get started, the company uses compact formats: For example, the AI Design Sprint® turns initial ideas into evaluated use cases; the AI Bricks workshop develops a conceptual prototype that can ultimately be transformed into a real prototype; and in the AI Fast Track, a functional prototype—including a roadmap—is developed within ten days.
During implementation, custom software is developed, and AI applications are integrated into existing systems such as ERP, CRM, or knowledge management. During ongoing operations, team neusta handles, among other things, cloud operations, application management, managed security, and identity and access management. Under the umbrella of AgentOps & AIOps, the company reliably brings agent-based AI systems into production while simultaneously using AI in IT operations to detect anomalies earlier and automate processes.
Sovereign AI: Mastering it rather than just using it
Dietrich has observed growing demand for alternatives from Germany and Europe. “The trend is clearly shifting toward European partners rather than overseas providers,” he says. Figures from the digital industry association Bitkom support this assessment: According to a representative survey of 603 companies in Germany, 71 percent currently use cloud services from the U.S., but only 8 percent would prefer them*. Together with CONTACT, team neusta aims to demonstrate the significant potential that Germany has to offer as a business location. The synergies between the two companies are expected to expand the portfolio, for example in the area of discrete manufacturing. In addition, team neusta will benefit in the future from CONTACT’s nationwide network of ten locations.
A central guiding principle here is digital sovereignty. What matters most is no longer whether companies use AI, “but how sovereign we remain in the process,” says Dietrich. In other words, the use of AI should be controlled, traceable, and as independent as possible from individual technology providers. Just how quickly dependencies can become a risk was demonstrated in June by the temporary suspension of the AI model Fable 5 as a result of U.S. export controls. The case made it clear that foreign applications can be taken away from us from one day to the next. The fact that corporate data stored in software from U.S. providers—even on European servers—is fundamentally subject to U.S. law is another aspect that the company aims to address with sovereign solutions.
For team neusta, sovereignty does not mean fundamentally excluding certain technologies, but rather retaining freedom of choice. Where it makes sense, the Bremen-based company relies on open models operated on its own or European infrastructure and keeps customer data within the agreed-upon legal framework. team neusta is already demonstrating how this works in practice: The company operates its own AI infrastructure for software development and agent-based workflows. Furthermore, a dedicated, sovereign sandbox limits what AI agents can access. With the AI Suite, team neusta offers customers an AI platform developed and hosted in Germany for knowledge management, text generation, online research, and custom modules—such as AI-powered access to their own data via natural language.
In-House AI Expertise
According to Dietrich, AI sovereignty is “not a product you buy, but a capability you build.” team neusta is first building this capability in-house. The approximately 850 employees are expected to take on more advisory roles and use AI in a way that supports their work rather than replacing it. To this end, the company is focusing on continuing education, transparent technology and model selection, and controlled automation. At the same time, the goal for internal processes is not merely to make them more efficient with the help of AI, but to rethink them and thereby implement them with higher quality. “Becoming AI-native is the goal, both for team neusta and for the clients we have the privilege of supporting in their transformation.”
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