Kai Waehner
Advisory Field CTO at Kai Waehner GmbH and Global Field CTO at Kestra
For over 20 years, I’ve worked with Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies on the decisions that matter most: where to bet on data infrastructure, how to evaluate AI architectures before committing, and how to cut through the noise in a market that never stops generating it. Even though I work for a dedicated vendor (Kestra), my opinion is built independently, which means my only agenda is the right answer for your situation.
My work spans across all industries, from financial services, manufacturing, telecom, retail, to the public sector, and just as many conversations, from strategic sessions with CIOs to deep architecture reviews with engineering teams. That range isn’t accidental. The decisions I care about most live at the intersection of business intent and technical reality, and you need fluency in both to make them well.
I’m known for my independent technology landscapes covering data integration, process intelligence, and trusted agentic AI. These are assessments built without vendor sponsorship and without the usual conflicts of interest. I write regularly at kai-waehner.de, covering industry use cases, architectural best practices, and what’s actually worth your attention as an enterprise architect, CTO, CDO, or data engineer.
I’ve spoken at over 100 events worldwide, from AWS re:Invent and O’Reilly Software Architecture to CIO and CTO executive summits, and I’m available for advisory engagements, workshops, and keynotes across Europe, North America, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia.
If you’re making a consequential architecture call and want a second opinion with no strings attached, that’s exactly what I do. If you want to get your real-life use case of your technology seen in the world of my readers, we can collaborate on this as well.
"Thought Leadership across Data Integration, Process Intelligence and Workflow Orchestration, Trusted Agentic AI, and Enterprise Architecture"
My current work centers on workflow orchestration and process intelligence at Kestra, alongside my independent advisory practice. I help enterprises connect business intent with technical reality across data integration, trusted agentic AI, and enterprise architecture. My background spans two decades. I started in vendor-independent system integration and consulting, then moved through the software vendors Talend, TIBCO, and Confluent. That arc runs from batch to real-time, and now to orchestration. I publish independent technology landscapes with no vendor sponsorship.
Stay up to date with my latest blog posts by subscribing to my newsletter, and follow me on LinkedIn or X, formerly Twitter, to stay connected.
On my blog, I regularly share insights about new technologies, articles, and conference talks. From time to time, I also publish code on GitHub, including implementations such as “Real-Time Machine Learning with Kafka and TensorFlow.”
I feel honored to be a MVB (Most Valuable Blogger) at the JAVALOBBY of DZone.
Many of these articles are also published at the online publishing platform Medium, too
I am a regular speaker at international conferences such as Devoxx, Kafka Summit, Current, AWS re:Invent and various CIO and CTO events.
A few impressions from customer events over the years, bringing together IT executives, developers, architects, data engineers, business teams, and partners. These pictures are from data streaming community events at BMW Group, Daimler Truck, and Michelin during my time at Confluent.