About Kristian Stoffregen

Table of Contents

Background #

Black-and-white portrait of Kristian Stoffregen

My career has run along three tracks: industry, research, and teaching. One question ties them together. How do people and organizations actually change when new technology arrives?

Industry #

I spent years inside the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR), Microsoft, Danfoss, PwC, and CGI, working on knowledge management, enterprise software, and the architecture of large-scale change. At Microsoft I contributed to several patent filings, from enterprise knowledge management to user-interface design and mobile technology.

Selected chapters from my professional journey

Those years left me with a view of digital transformation that the textbooks mostly do not share. It is sold as a project with an end date. Inside organisations with hundreds of disconnected systems and thin data foundations it never behaved like one, and most of the large change programmes I saw up close struggled or quietly failed.

The questions that stayed with me are simple ones. Which mistakes could have been avoided? Which capabilities did the organisation actually lack? Which hard truths had everyone agreed not to say out loud? They shape both my research and the way I teach.

Kristian Stoffregen leading a Value Proposition Design session at PwC

Wall of ideas and initiatives mapped against team roles during a business development workshop at PwC

From the years I taught inside PwC: a Value Proposition Design session, and the wall after a business-development workshop.

Research #

I hold a business PhD from Copenhagen Business School, with a dissertation on knowledge management systems in practice, and I was a visiting scholar at Stanford. My older work on persuasive-technology frameworks has been cited a few hundred times since. My current research runs along two tracks: AI transformation in small and medium-sized enterprises, and generative AI as persuasive actors, currently how SMEs can use persuasive chatbots to advise customers and move them toward a call to action. For the full record, see Research and Publications.

Kristian Stoffregen as a visiting scholar at Stanford H-STAR — Visiting scholar at Stanford’s H-STAR Institute.

Teaching #

I teach and do research in the DIGITAL department at EK (Erhvervsakademi København). At BA level my courses cover AI-assisted coding, enterprise architecture, and philosophy of science.

The enterprise architecture and project management canon has not caught up with generative AI. The frameworks still hold, but they describe a way of working where the AI sits outside the work. AI-assisted coding is maturing fast. AI-assisted architecture and AI-assisted project management barely exist as teaching material yet, so part of my job is to teach into that gap.

Spaghetti, marshmallows, and string laid out on a desk to start the marshmallow tower challenge

Students collaborating on a tetrahedral spaghetti-and-marshmallow structure mid-build

A finished tall spaghetti-and-marshmallow tower standing on a classroom desk by a window

Marshmallow Tower challenge with my BA students at EK: cheap materials, hard physical constraints, fast iteration. The conversation about agile and prototyping lands differently after people have actually tried to build something themselves.

Before EK I worked with IT architecture principles inside large organisations, where the hard part was rarely the technology and usually the politics around it. At PwC I also taught digital transformation and user-centred design facilitation to consultants and client teams.

For full credentials, see LinkedIn.

Fun facts #

A first-generation digital native #

I have worked with computers since I was six. First-generation digital native, started on a Commodore 64. That machine taught me that interesting systems reward patience and curiosity. Not much has changed since.

Commodore 64, where it all started — Where it all started: the Commodore 64.

I’m a cyborg #

I’m a cyborg. Cyborg is a blend of cybernetic and organism; it refers to beings with both organic and biomechatronic body parts.

I lost the hearing in my right ear in a scuba-diving accident. Now I have a bone-anchored hearing aid, a bone-conduction implant system. I use Oticon’s Ponto 5, mounted on a titanium implant drilled into my skull. It has changed my life for the better, but I don’t get stereo ;-)

An Oticon Ponto 5 bone-anchored hearing aid mounted on a titanium abutment — Oticon’s Ponto 5: the device that gave me back the right side of the room.

Kristian Stoffregen at the helm of a small boat in Copenhagen harbor on a sunny day, wearing a blue bucket hat and sunglasses — Out on the harbor in Copenhagen.

Kristian with a life-sized woolly mammoth — I like a good challenge.