Mgr. Jan Romportl, Ph.D.

In a Nutshell

I have 20 years of expertise as an AI researcher, entrepreneur, consultant, and executive. I can give you true insights into how AI really works and what its potential and limits are – unlike many self-proclaimed freshly baked “AI experts” who suddenly appeared with the hype of ChatGPT and who learn about AI from trendy blogs and newsletters.

I’m also a runner, PADI divemaster, private pilot, philosopher, and a lifelong Atari enthusiast and vintage computer collector.

Academic Career

If you had asked me ten years ago where I envisaged my professional future, I would have said I wanted to become a prominent AI researcher in academia. Sure enough, I was still full of academic idealism.

I conducted great research projects in the area of man-machine interaction, I was the head of a university department, I had a Ph.D. in AI, a master’s in cybernetics, and another master’s in philosophy, and I had just returned from an academic visit to Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute. And I wanted to save the world.

However, the local academic treadmill of publish-or-perish culture turned out to be very distant from the real-world impacts I had imagined. So, in 2015, I decided to take a leap of faith and leave my senior academic and management positions at the university to join a corporation as a chief data scientist in O2 Czech Republic.

PPF and O2 Czech Republic

You may wonder why O2. I’ll tell you. Because PPF then recently acquired O2 and was damn well situated in the CEE region to make a real impact on things. They had no AI and very scattered and inefficient data science and big data teams here and there. So, I thought, what if we fix it? And why not build excellent AI competencies in O2 and PPF?