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SEPTEMBER 2026 I I-CONNECT007 MAGAZINE 23 ness for standards, serving German corporations and SMEs. My role was to rethink the way standards were being provided to industry there. I joined DIN Media as a managing director in 2019, and I said to myself, "They've been selling print standards for almost a century, and about 25 years as PDFs. It's time for something different. The industry has changed." They expect us to deliver it in a way that's more natural to what they're doing in terms of auto- mation, digitalization, and later also robotics that are now just around the corner, in other words, all things smart standards. Building on the existing tech teams at DIN Media, we built a user-centric software and AI company that eventually became an independent company in its own right. It's now called DIN Solutions, which is the high-tech innovation and AI arm of DIN. My main expertise is in industrial AI, data strategies, and business development, which I've been involved in for almost 10 years now, through software devel- opment and transforming businesses. That's one reason this job interested me. I do not develop the content of the standards; I focus on the standards' user side of our business. I come from the tech, software, and AI angles to service the community as well as possible. Given that DIN is a standards organization in and of itself, would you explain the relationship be- tween DIN and the Global Electronics Association? DIN sold IPC standards to our German customers. When I started working on smart standards with ISO and CEN, we reviewed many standards from around the world, including, of course, IPC standards. The electronics and chip industries work with IPC stan- dards, and, in my mind, they sit at the very center of the European chip strategy. Smart standards are a gateway to the digital future of European indus- try, of which electronics are an integral part. That is why, in my opinion, IPC standards will play a key role in Europe's future digital landscape, particularly in smart standards and industrial AI. What do you mean by "smart standards?" Smart standards are machine-readable and appli- cable. Machines, robots, and any kind of device, whether in a manufacturing or industrial environ- ment, can immediately use these standards. Usually, they come in a format like XML or another digital format that you can push directly into a machine, computer, tablet, robot, or other manufacturing equipment in real time, and those devices can act on them immediately. In the not-so-