Tech and Trust at the Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub: Innovating for and with the Troops with Sarah Marie Sandmann (EP 30)

🎙️ Sarah Marie Sandmann, Innovation & Intrapreneurship, Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub AI trust in defence starts where slides end: with a soldier under pressure who needs to understand, rely on, and account for the technology in their hands. Sarah Marie Sandmann works at the Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub in Innovation and Intrapreneurship, the official innovation unit of the German armed forces. Sandmann treats trust in defence technology as a capability criterion, something tested under pressure, not asserted in policy, and the organisations getting this right are rebuilding how innovation works within the institution itself. 📖 Episode overview The Bundeswehr is one of Europe's most structurally complex organisations, built for stability, accountability, and risk minimisation, not speed. Sandmann and her colleagues run innovation projects at 12-month cycles that would take years through standard procurement. This episode explores what that tension looks like in practice: how AI is deployed strictly as decision support rather than decision replacement, how soldiers co-develop the technologies they will eventually trust with their lives, and why a trustworthy defence innovation ecosystem would be measured by capabilities delivered rather than the quality of its presentations. Sandmann also reflects on the post-Ukraine shift she has observed from inside the institution — more civilians wanting to contribute, more startups engaging with defence, and what that change means for civil-military trust. 🔍 Key themes Whether a soldier can understand, rely on, and explain an AI system, and why all three must be true before deployment The structural case for why large institutions are slow to innovate, and why the people inside them usually aren't the problem What "decision support, not decision replacement" means as a live design constraint for AI in high-stakes environments How trust between military institutions and the startup ecosystem is actually built, and what breaks it What a trustworthy defence innovation ecosystem would need to look like in two to three years 👤 About the guest Sarah Marie Sandmann works at the Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub in Innovation and Intrapreneurship, the official innovation unit of the German armed forces. She works at the intersection of military capability development, startup collaboration, and responsible technology adoption, collaborating on projects that bring AI, autonomous systems, and emerging technologies into operational use through direct co-development with soldiers. She has been inside the institution through the post-Ukraine shift in civil-military engagement and speaks from that experience with unusual clarity. ⏱ Chapter markers [00:00] What the Cyber Innovation Hub actually does — and why cockroaches are involved [03:18] Trust as an operational requirement in defence technology [08:00] Why innovation resistance is structural, not cultural [13:09] AI as decision support — the bright line and how it holds [21:22] The post-Ukraine shift and what a trustworthy ecosystem would look like 🔗 Links Sarah Marie Sandmann on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-sandmann/ Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/ Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub — https://www.cyberinnovationhub.de/en/ SwarmBioTactics and Autobugs project — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4vu5AKTkJk Komand.AI and Smart Lead project — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r45um6txpQ Sonic AI - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9i98jrielw Related Episode: Why Security Intelligence Fails Before the Attack with Assaf Kipnies - https://open.spotify.com/episode/2D4ODAxGULFbqmXCmgwsfA