E 776 — AI Agents Inside a German Mittelstand Company

AI agents are running an IT department at one of the newer German startups — and its co-founder says most companies adding AI to their processes are about to make things worse. Delia Hallberg founded Amadeni AI in January 2026 and builds AI-supported custom software for Mittelstand Germany. Part 1 of 2 is the diagnosis: software, process or leadership, and why a bad process with AI on top breaks faster, louder and more expensively. The naming test — if nobody can describe the process without naming a colleague, it is habits, not a process Impuls KBB — 8 hours to 2 on development reports, €21,000 a month, four-week return The bakery — 20 systems, 40 media breaks, 35 hours a week of duplicate work AI agents at work — 80 percent of marketing, plus research, sales handover and multi-agent coding Not vibe coding — what an elaborate agent process looks like next to a weekend prototype Ostdeutscher Bankenverband — small tasks, unconnected models, full source traceability Shadow IT — the private spreadsheet and the WhatsApp group that is really the project tool Chapters (estimated — confirm against the final cut) 00:00 Cheap code versus bought software 01:10 Software, process or leadership 04:05 Sociology, symptoms and an ERP nobody asked for 06:40 Which AI agents do what four people did 10:15 Quality control on agent output 12:00 Lean company or hidden fragility 15:20 When not to build custom software 18:40 Impuls KBB — 8 hours to 2 23:10 Triage with 40 media breaks 26:30 The one metric worth trusting 29:40 The naming test and shadow IT 33:00 Designing against hallucination Part 2 lands Tuesday, September 22nd, 2026 — missing APIs and digital sovereignty in Europe. Full blog post and sources: startuprad.io Selling into Germany, Austria and Switzerland? Growth partnerships with Startuprad.io reach this audience: startuprad.io/become-a-partner Host: Jörn "Joe" Menninger, Frankfurt am Main. LinkedIn Subscribe: linktr.ee/startupradio Machine-readable data: startuprad.io/llm Corrections: partnerships@startuprad.io Created with the assistance of AI. Folge direkt herunterladen © Startuprad.io™ – All Rights Reserved | AI & research reference → https://www.startuprad.io/llm