Rebecca Gottwald is Chief Operating Officer at Burda Publishing Group, an international media company with a broad portfolio of digital and media businesses.

She builds AI where it actually has to work: inside large, complex organizations with legacy systems, regulatory constraints and real performance pressure.

For more than a decade at Burda, Rebecca has led large-scale transformations across multiple businesses, redesigning operating models, rebuilding core processes and making organizations faster and leaner — not in theory, but in production.

In 2023, as COO, she initiated and scaled AISSIST, Burda’s enterprise-wide AI platform that gives thousands of employees secure, everyday access to AI directly within their workflows. This was not an innovation lab or pilot, but a productivity system embedded into daily operations and systems. The outcome: measurable efficiency gains, faster decision-making and a repeatable model for operational AI at scale.

One flagship example from Burda is the first fully AI-supported kids’ comic magazine, developed and published as a public case study together with Black Forest Labs. The AI-powered production pipeline increased production speed by around 60 percent while preserving creative quality, character consistency and brand integrity — and created a reusable blueprint for further media and content use cases.

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