About

I have spent much of the past twenty years trying to understand how political and economic forces shape decisions that are framed as purely technical – and the risks of pretending they do not.

That interest started with German politics, later enhanced by European and Asian realities. Initial training as an economist in London, a Master's degree in Singapore covering political and sovereign risk, a UK PhD examining Germany's strategic positioning towards China, and a career that has taken me through Brussels, Berlin, Bangkok, and Shanghai taught me that the most consequential risks in technology and governance are rarely the ones in the risk register. They are the ones nobody thought to put there – or the ones that were too (politically) inconvenient to name.

Today, I work on AI governance, digital infrastructure, and interoperability – the kind of interoperability that is more about organisations and politics than about APIs and data formats. I advise cities, international organisations, and the private sector through Interveo, and I co-founded AIffect with Dr Ivy Yang to help European start-ups and SMEs turn AI regulation into something far more useful than a compliance headache.

Risk(y) Matters is where I write about the things that sit between these worlds: AI, digital governance, and the geopolitics that increasingly shapes both. The parenthetical – "(y)" – is deliberate.

Dr Gert Hilgers

PS: LinkedIn has the full career history, if you are the thorough type.