About David Scheler

I am a senior AI product and technical program leader with experience spanning machine-learning research, production Voice AI at Volkswagen Group, global automotive delivery at SoundHound AI, startup product leadership, hands-on prototyping, and university teaching. I connect product choices, architecture, engineering delivery, user needs, and organizational ownership so complex AI initiatives can move from uncertainty to clear decisions and working systems.

Experience

I began as a research associate in machine learning and multimodal systems at TU Braunschweig. At Volkswagen Group, I moved into production Voice AI across speech-system requirements, NLU, TTS, coverage qualification, and a multi-user prototype shown at CES 2016.

At SoundHound AI, I served as the primary onsite technical interface during the MVP phase of a global automotive Voice AI integration. The work connected engineering teams with an OEM, systems integrator, UX, technology partners, and executive stakeholders across requirements, architecture, dependencies, trade-offs, and risk.

I later led product and a cross-functional engineering organization at a medical Voice AI startup. More recently, I combined technical product leadership with hands-on development for a German customer-acquisition business, including a conversational system that connected previously unreachable prospects to an existing commercial process and generated direct revenue.

Selected Experience provides the concise reference view. Junglebrains is my independent applied-AI advisory for bounded work with product and engineering teams.

Perspective and Mission

Across very different settings, I keep returning to the interfaces where no single discipline holds the whole answer: between technology and human experience, product ambition and engineering reality, local decisions and the wider organization. I am interested in the recurring patterns through which complex systems in business, society, nature, intelligence, and cognition coordinate and adapt.

That perspective has a practical purpose. I want to help build technology and organizations that can learn, remain accountable to the people they affect, and become more capable without concentrating every decision into a single model, metric, or center of control.

Research and Teaching

My academic work includes six peer-reviewed publications, a best-paper award, externally funded research, and several patents assigned to Volkswagen Group. Since 2020, I have been a guest lecturer at Hochschule Furtwangen University, teaching across AI ethics, human-centric Conversational AI, and agentic human–AI collectives.

My current independent research explores Active Inference, distributed intelligence, and the coordination of human–AI systems. The conceptual work and experiments are still in development. More detail is available on Research and Teaching.

Music

Alongside technology, I compose music for film and television. It is a parallel creative practice grounded in structure, timing, narrative, audiovisual aesthetic experience, and the relationship between individual elements and the whole.

Across technology, organizations, research, and music, I return to the same challenge: how complex structures can become coherent without being flattened into something simpler than they are. I call this coherent complexity.

Memberships

• Alumni der Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes e.V.
• Alumni des Parlamentarischen Patenschafts-Programms des Deutschen Bundestages und des Kongresses der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika e.V.