Welcome to release v2026.06!
The world is changing faster than most institutions can keep up. Politically, technologically, socially. Who writes the rules for this change, and who gets left out, aren’t technical questions, but technology plays a major role.
So what does that mean for digital products, political communication, and the platforms and tools we choose to trust?
In this issue
- ✏️ Centigrade Recommends: Empire of AI – Karen Hao / The OpenAI Story
- 🎥 Centigrade on SR: Can AI support inclusion?
- 👁️ Nuremberg Digital Festival: Virtual politician personas on stage on June 29
- 🤖 AI automation, done right: Centigrade as an AI automation agency
- 🌐 W-Social: Sign up for the new European platform’s public beta
Until the next release,
Your Centigrade team 💙
Centigrade Recommends
Empire of AI – Karen Hao / OpenAI Story Podcast
Karen Hao has reported on OpenAI for years. In Empire of AI, she describes how an idealistic non-profit project became one of the world’s most influential technology companies. Her precise reporting shows how far the AI industry’s aspirations can diverge from reality.
If you’d rather listen than read, the Deutschlandfunk podcast “OpenAI Story” draws directly on the book and is a great place to start.
Listen to the podcast · Get the book
Centigrade on SR
Can AI support inclusion?
For Diversity Day, the local SPD association in Bübingen visited us to see our Person-a-Mat, and Saarländischer Rundfunk brought a camera along.
The main question was: how can we bring the needs of people with disabilities into digital product development early? Deaf, visually impaired, or mobility-impaired people can’t use every piece of software, and discovering that only at the end of a project makes fixes expensive. Our Person-a-Mat uses AI-powered personas to surface these issues earlier.
The SPD is interested in a different use case: testing political messages with different personas in advance. Not as a replacement for real conversations with people, but as preparation for them. AI output needs to be interpreted and owned. Thomas sums it up in the report: AI can support us, but it’s essential that real people talk to real people. AI can’t make those decisions for us.
Nuremberg Digital Festival
Virtual politician personas on stage
The topic from the SR report continues on the big stage: on June 29, from 1 to 4 p.m., Thomas will speak at Nuremberg Digital Festival in the Lorenzer Pfarrhof (Sophiensaal) about virtual politician personas and whether AI hallucinates just like some politicians.
The talk shows how to build vivid AI personas from party platforms and voting records, and what happens when you question them directly. Do they stick to their platforms?
Centigrade as an AI automation agency
From hype to leverage: how we use AI effectively and reliably
AI agents are most useful when they don’t just run wild, but focus on the tasks they were built for, without wasting tokens or making uncontrolled decisions.
Our approach: using n8n, we build agents that run on rails. Clear workflows, defined handoffs, and a human in the driver’s seat.
We’ve summarized what that looks like in practice and which use cases it works best for on our new landing page.
W-Social public beta from June 17
W-Social is about to launch a European platform that wants to put social media on a different footing: verified instead of a rumor mill, values instead of pure engagement optimization. Whether the promise holds remains to be seen, but it sounds like an experiment worth joining.
Our CEO Thomas has already joined the waitlist. The public beta starts on June 17 at 4 p.m.