Dr. Linus Kohl

Head of Digitalisation & IT

An industrial manufacturing site in Austria · member of the site management team

• Responsible for the site’s digital and IT agenda, from enterprise systems and production data to the use of AI in business and manufacturing processes, together with reliable day-to-day operations.
• Replaced team-by-team spreadsheets with a single governed forecasting layer in the CRM system that feeds sales planning directly.
• Introduced a stewardship model for master data in the ERP system, with named owners in the business rather than in IT.
• Standardised production data capture and built shared analyses of equipment effectiveness and major stoppages for production management.
• Leads the professionalisation of test management within a multi-site ERP migration programme.
• Built a network of trained key users that handles most day-to-day questions where they arise.
• Laid the foundations for a predictive-maintenance proof of concept, bringing doctoral research to the shop floor.

Group Leader, Production Optimisation & Maintenance Management

Fraunhofer Austria Research GmbH

• Led applied research and delivery projects with partners in the automotive and semiconductor industries.
• Held a leading role in the Smart Maintenance Community.
• Research on knowledge-based maintenance, text mining of maintenance records and AI assistance for planners and technicians.

Doctorate, TU Wien

Dissertation: “Knowledge-based maintenance framework for smart manufacturing: advancing efficient planning and cognitive assistance to enhance system availability”.

Diploma, TU Wien

Thesis on the automatic generation of recommendations in a prescriptive maintenance model.

18 publications, 260+ citations, h-index 7 (Google Scholar, November 2026). Outlets include CIRP Annals, Procedia CIRP, the PHM Society European Conference and IEEE ETFA.

• Ansari, Kohl, Sihn (2023). A competence-based planning methodology for optimizing human resource allocation in industrial maintenance. CIRP Annals 72(1).
• Ansari, Kohl, Giner, Meier (2021). Text mining for AI enhanced failure detection and availability optimization in production systems. CIRP Annals 70(1).
• Kohl, Eschenbacher, Besinger, Ansari (2024). Large language model-based chatbot for improving human-centricity in maintenance planning and operations. PHM Society European Conference 8(1).
• Kohl, Ansari (2024). A knowledge graph-based learning assistance system for industrial maintenance. Procedia CIRP 126.

Full list

Guest lectures and thesis supervision at TU Wien, Institute of Management Science.

The firm of one

A privately run operating model of four AI agents and 28 services with one accountable owner, at about €188 a month. Used as a management case on decision rights, cost, failure and organisational memory, and published as a series of essays from December 2026. Private project, private time, private equipment; no employer data.

CIO Kongress, Loipersdorf, October 2026. Talks on the shifting role of IT and on operating models for AI agents. Topics

German and English; works and publishes in both.