Horst Samulowitz

I am a Principal Research Scientist and Manager in IBM’s Generative AI for Data organization, where I lead the development of foundational AI technologies that automate data understanding, management, and analytics at enterprise scale. My work focuses on transforming advances in artificial intelligence into products and platforms that help organizations derive actionable insights from complex data ecosystems.

I conceived and championed IBM’s AutoAI initiative, presenting the vision to IBM’s senior leadership, including the CEO, and subsequently leading its development from research concept to a core capability within IBM’s Data and AI platform. Building on this success, I initiated and led IBM’s Semantic Automation program, pioneering foundation models for tabular data that enable enterprise systems to automatically enrich data with semantic meaning and support data discovery, governance, and analytics. These technologies are now incorporated into IBM products and have helped strengthen IBM’s leadership in enterprise data management.

My current research explores the next generation of AI-powered data systems, combining large language models and world models to create autonomous data systems. These systems translate natural-language intent into self-generating and self-maintaining data ecosystems capable of discovering, integrating, curating, and serving the data required by applications and intelligent agents, while adapting dynamically and pro-actively with minimal human intervention.

Throughout my career, I have combined scientific innovation with product leadership, building and guiding multidisciplinary teams that bring advanced research into production. My work has taken me across six countries and three continents, including research positions at Microsoft Research and the University of Melbourne. I hold a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto and a Master’s degree from RWTH Aachen University.