Zurich AI Lab — News

Konstantinos Katharakis joins the Zurich AI Lab

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Konstantinos Katharakis joins the Zurich AI Lab as a research associate and PhD student at the University of St.Gallen. Welcome, Konstantinos!

Lydia Larasati joins the Zurich AI Lab

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Lydia Larasati joins the Zurich AI Lab as a research associate and PhD student at the University of St.Gallen. Welcome, Lydia!

Tomoko Yokoi presents at the Open and User Innovation Conference at Harvard

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Dr. Tomoko Yokoi presented her work on human–AI collaboration at the 23rd Annual International Conference on Open and User Innovation, held at Harvard Business School.

Karolin Frankenberger at the AI for Good Global Summit

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Prof. Dr. Karolin Frankenberger, Founder & Academic Chair of the Zurich AI Lab and Director of the Institute of Management & Strategy at the University of St.Gallen, took part in the AI for Good Global Summit 2026 in Geneva. Her session, “AI dependency: building resilience before failures cascade,” examined how organisations and the wider system can stay resilient as critical functions come to depend on AI.

Tomoko Yokoi gives a seminar on human–AI collaboration at NTU Singapore

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Dr. Tomoko Yokoi gave a seminar on human–AI collaboration at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, hosted by the Centre for Lifelong Learning and Individualised Cognition.

Tomoko Yokoi on Human-Centric AI at the Asian Development Bank

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Dr. Tomoko Yokoi gave a series of talks on Human-Centric AI at the Asian Development Bank, where she outlined three approaches to keeping human values at the centre of AI adoption.

Mathieu Van de Catsije joins the Zurich AI Lab

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mathieu Van de Catsije joins the Zurich AI Lab as a research associate and PhD student at the University of St.Gallen. Welcome, Mathieu!

Tomoko Yokoi presents two papers at the LSE Theorizing Data and AI workshop

Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Dr. Tomoko Yokoi presented two papers at the Theorizing Data and AI workshop at the London School of Economics. The first, a working paper, examines how AI governance emerges in distributed settings. The second, recently published in the Strategic Management Journal, studies cognitive asymmetry in human–AI collaboration.

Caroline Mann joins the Zurich AI Lab

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Caroline Mann joins the Zurich AI Lab as a research associate and PhD student at the University of St.Gallen. Welcome, Caroline!

Zurich, ETH Zürich and HSG launch the Zurich AI Lab

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

The Zurich AI Lab was founded on 29 October 2025 as a joint initiative of Zurich Insurance, ETH Zürich and the University of St. Gallen (HSG). It brings together an insurer’s operational reality, ETH’s technical depth, and HSG’s work on management, governance and decision-making under one roof.

The premise is narrow on purpose. Public debate about AI in insurance still turns on a single binary — will it replace the underwriter, the claims handler, the broker? That is the wrong unit of analysis. An insurer does not buy a model; it carries a risk, and someone has to be accountable for the price it put on that risk. The useful questions are about deployments: a specific system, doing a specific task, inside a specific book of business. Where can such a system reach expert-level judgement? Where does it fail, and are those failures the kind a reviewer can catch? What does the human do once the work arrives already half-done?

The lab studies these questions in real deployment settings as the work develops, rather than through demonstrations — concentrating on where a system reaches expert-level judgement, how the human role changes, and who remains accountable for the decision.

This page records the founding fact only. The lab’s way of working is set out across the rest of the site; its outputs will develop in public as the work matures. For the official announcement, see the Zurich press release linked above.