The Grand Challengers Podcast Episode #67

Literacy before fluency, why AI is not a religion and the brain needs training

Guest: Anastassia Lauterbach

July 21st, 2026

Overview

Most of us now use AI every day. Very few of us could explain what it is actually doing.

Anastassia Lauterbach thinks that gap is the most dangerous thing about this technology, and she has built a company to close it. She is a linguist, a trained clinical psychologist, a former senior executive at Qualcomm and Deutsche Telekom, a former non-executive director at easyJet, Dun & Bradstreet and Wirecard, and now founder and CEO of AI Edutainment in Basel.

In this episode she draws a line that most companies and governments have quietly erased. AI literacy is not AI fluency. Fluency is knowing how to prompt, and it is what almost every corporate and government programme now teaches. Literacy is understanding why every large language model hallucinates and why that cannot be engineered away, where your data goes when you upload it, and when the honest answer is to not use AI at all. Understanding gives you the power to question, and questioning, as she puts it, is precisely what consultancies and AI vendors would rather you did not do. Invest only in fluency and what you scale is mediocrity.

We work through the four principles of her Responsible AI white paper. First, changing the architecture itself, so that machines can reason about cause and effect, model the world and understand other minds. Second, radical transparency, where failures are reported as clearly as successes. Third, literacy as understanding rather than tool training. And fourth, the fusion of STEM with the humanities to defend the human creative purpose. She makes the case that writing is a thinking technology rather than a communication tool, that cognitive capital belongs next to human capital on the balance sheet, and that the brain, like any muscle, needs resistance training. Anastassia is also unsparing about the elevation of AI into a religion, complete with its own popes, its own churches, and its own heretics.

But this is a biographical show, and Anastassia’s own story is remarkable. We begin at a grand piano in Basel, with absolute pitch and a childhood spent in a two-room Moscow apartment with four people and a dog. We travel through simultaneous translation on Yugoslav construction sites, a broadcasting career at Deutsche Welle, three decades in the boardrooms of European technology, and the collapse of Wirecard, which cost her almost everything she owned. What she rebuilt from it is an AI literacy company, a series of children’s books, and a ginger cat who serves as Chief Marketing Officer.

Episode Teaser

AI is being elevated into the status of a religion, with different churches and different popes. Anastassia Lauterbach, linguist, clinical psychologist and founder of AI Edutainment, makes the case for informed scepticism instead. Literacy comes first, fluency comes second, and the brain still needs to do the work.

Biography

“…If we want a certain future to be, we need to have a concept on what it might look like and what are the skills we would like to support…”

Dr Anastassia Lauterbach is the founder and CEO of AI Edutainment, an AI literacy company based in Basel, Switzerland, and one of Europe’s most experienced technology board directors. Born in Moscow, she read linguistics at Lomonosov Moscow State University, moved to Germany in the early 1990s, and completed a PhD in linguistics and clinical psychology at the University of Bonn, where her research focussed on aphasia and the language capacity of the brain. She speaks six languages. Her corporate career began at Munich Re and McKinsey and led to senior executive roles at Daimler, T-Mobile International, Deutsche Telekom and Qualcomm, where as Senior Vice President for Europe she carried profit and loss responsibility of 4.7 billion euros. She has served as a non-executive director and supervisory board member at easyJet, Dun & Bradstreet, censhare, Aircision and Wirecard, and on advisory boards at Intel, Nasdaq and Star Alliance. At Wirecard she chaired risk and compliance and triggered the compliance study that led to the appointment of KPMG as special auditor, work that contributed to the discovery of the fraud. She later gave two days of testimony in the criminal trial of the company’s former chief executive.

Today Anastassia devotes her work to making AI understandable to people who have no background in computer science or mathematics. She is Professor of Cybersecurity and AI at MCI Innsbruck, the lead author of “The AI Imperative: A Roadmap for Business” (Praeger, 2018), and the creator of the “Romy & Roby” series, which teaches children and their families about AI, robotics and quantum technologies (the first volume is dedicated to the children of Ukraine, who can download it free of charge). She hosts the podcast “AI Snacks with Romy & Roby”, writes the blog “The Evolution of AI”, and in April 2026 published the white paper “What Should Responsible AI Be About, If We Put the Noise Aside?”. She mentors chief executives, board members and founders, with a particular focus on those navigating a crisis that was not of their making. In 2024 the Business Excellence Institute in Dublin inducted her into its Hall of Fame for Business Excellence. She self-funds her AI literacy work, and describes her mission simply: to educate a million people about AI.

Dr Anastassia Lauterbach headshot, linguist, clinical psychologist and founder of AI Edutainment in Basel, an AI literacy company

Quick Summary & Highlights

  • Literacy is not fluency. Fluency is prompting. Literacy is understanding what a model can and cannot do. Almost every corporate and government AI programme teaches the second and skips the first.
  • Hallucinations are structural, not a bug. They cannot be engineered out of transformers. What can be built is better governance, better architecture and better human judgement around them.
  • Four principles of responsible AI: change the architecture (causality, world models, theory of mind), report failures as radically as successes, teach literacy rather than tools, and fuse STEM with the humanities.
  • Cognitive capital. If human capital sits on the balance sheet, why not the cognitive capacity we are quietly offloading to machines?
  • A life in structures. From absolute pitch and a Moscow music school to Qualcomm, the Wirecard collapse, and rebuilding from nothing with a cat as Chief Marketing Officer.

Resources Related to the Episode

Anastassia’s Work

Key Research and Publications

Tools, Methods and Context

Cultural and Fun References

Episode Chapters

(Chapters are embedded in the episode for quick access, click this to expand and view all chapters and time stamps)
  • 0:00 Intro
  • 1:59 Guest Intro, Basel and Piano
  • 15:15 Anastassia’s early journey
  • 21:43 The Brain and critique on today’s AI and society
  • 35:49 Anastassia’s Mission in AI Literacy
  • 42:34 AI Literacy vs. AI Fluency
  • 48:08 The cognitive challenge and appetite for understanding
  • 51:52 Mediocrity and the need to celebrate human effort
  • 55:18 Education reforms and re-exercising our brain
  • 1:09:37 Reaching the four pillars of Responsible AI
  • 1:19:17 Anastassia’s Vision
  • 1:24:05 Q&A Start
  • 1:24:32 What does innovation mean to you?
  • 1:27:14 Key moment, event, person
  • 1:28:22 Time Management
  • 1:32:49 Favourite childhood memory
  • 1:35:16 Biggest challenge to date
  • 1:41:34 Advice for young professionals
  • 1:43:38 What would you most like to be remembered for?
  • 1:43:52 Where can people find you?
  • 1:46:39 Final Message
  • 1:46:58 Outro

Connect with Anastassia Lauterbach

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Credits