I am Umair Zaffar, founder and CEO of sifamo GmbH, an AI consultancy with offices in Berlin and Frankfurt. For more than ten years I have built IT systems for banks, insurers and the public sector, and for the last three years my focus has been on putting AI into production there in a way that stays controllable. This page is my answer to the question of what makes an AI expert today.
When ChatGPT arrived, everyone became an AI expert overnight. I say that deliberately, because I lived through it: nobody has 20 years of experience with large language models, agents or the EU AI Act. What does exist are people who have actually built AI systems, introduced them in regulated companies and taken them through audits. That is what my team and I do at SIFAMO, and that is what this page is about.
What I do as an AI expert
- AI strategy and use-case assessment for boards and business units: which use cases pay off, which are permissible under GDPR and the EU AI Act at all, and in which order to tackle them.
- Architecture and delivery of AI systems: large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, agents and data pipelines, embedded in existing enterprise landscapes.
- AI governance: a governance layer in which every model registers, every step is logged and decisions remain traceable for BaFin, DORA and MaRisk.
- Training without personal data: pseudonymisation with IDs, so models learn without ever having seen a real name.
- Keynotes and workshops for companies, associations and conferences, from the Frankfurt business community to the SIFAMO AI Summit in Dubai.
Why experience in regulated industries makes the difference
Introducing AI in a start-up is easy. Introducing AI in a bank, where every credit decision must be explainable and the supervisor can audit at any time, is a different discipline. Our clients come from exactly that environment: banks, insurers such as Zurich and VGH, industrial companies such as Bosch, logistics, public administration. What counts there is not whether something works technically, but whether every decision can be traced, audited and corrected afterwards.
That is why we never start with the model but with control: register, boundaries, escalation, human in the loop. Only then do we add the actual use cases. It sounds slower, but in practice it is the only route that gets through an audit without a rebuild.
Our own transformation as proof
We did not only advise clients, we rebuilt SIFAMO itself around AI. Our recruiting runs on a system that recognises hard skills in developer CVs with roughly 90 percent accuracy and has left us with only two departures in five years. Our ERP has run with an AI board since 2025. Almost everything we do internally runs with AI today. Anyone who has rebuilt their own company this way knows where the pitfalls are.
How to recognise a real AI expert
- They show running systems, not just slides. Ask for references that are in production and have passed an audit.
- They know the regulation: EU AI Act, GDPR, DORA, MaRisk, and can tell you which risk class your use case falls into.
- They say what they do not know. The field is three years old. Anyone claiming to have seen it all has not.
- They talk about control before they talk about speed. Everything else gets expensive.
Further reading in English
- AI, Cognitive Transformation & Data Integrity: Key Takeaways from My Keynote at the Frankfurt Business Forum
- How Skilldex Helped Us Fix Hiring, Stop Wasting Time, and Finally Match the Right People
- From Data Lag to Real-Time — Why Event-Driven Architectures Are Critical for Scalable AI
- Why Most AI Projects Never Leave the Lab — And How to Change That
- Why AI is Reshaping Business Models Faster Than Expected
- AI-Powered Business Transformation: The Future is Now
About Umair Zaffar
I started as a freelance software developer in 2017 with a first project at an insurer in Hanover. In 2019 my co-founder Ayman Kalaie and I founded sifamo GmbH, self-financed and without loans. Today around 30 consultants, architects and developers work from Berlin and Frankfurt am Main; above the GmbH sits SFM Holding with SIFAMO Events, the organiser of the SIFAMO AI Summit. Since 2023 our focus has been AI in regulated industries. On my YouTube channel and in this blog I share what we learn along the way: unfiltered, with numbers and without consultant jargon. Most posts are in German; the English articles from 2024 and 2025 are listed below.
Frequently asked questions
What does an AI expert do?
They assess which AI applications make sense and are permissible for a company, design the architecture, deliver the systems and make sure they remain controllable and compliant. In my case the role of founder comes on top: I am responsible for what my team builds at the client.
Which industries does Umair Zaffar work for?
The focus is on regulated industries: banks, insurers, the public sector, plus industry and logistics. Offices are in Berlin and Frankfurt; projects also run in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and the United States.
How can I engage Umair Zaffar as an AI expert?
For consulting, architecture reviews or a first workshop via the contact page or by e-mail at contact@sifamo.com. For talks there is a dedicated page on AI speaking.
Planning AI in your company and want to know whether your approach will hold up in front of regulators and customers? Reach me via the contact page, by e-mail at contact@sifamo.com or directly on LinkedIn.