Werchota Advisory · Vienna
Werchota Advisory works with boards, executive teams and public institutions to find where AI actually pays, to make the decision defensible, and to leave the capability inside the organisation when the engagement ends.
01The work
Most AI programmes stall in the same place. There is a strategy, a proof of concept, a vendor with a good story, and nobody who owns what happens on Monday. Twelve months later the board asks what came back, and the honest answer is a pilot and an invoice.
Werchota Advisory was built by someone who had to answer that question with a number. She built digital and AI functions inside companies from nothing, carried the budget, owned the board reporting, and trained the people who had to run everything once the programme closed. This is advice from the delivery side of the table.
You find out what is already working, what needs a different scope or a different owner, and what is ready to scale.
You take a ranked portfolio to the board, with a named owner against every line.
Your teams stop experimenting and start producing, and they can build what they need next without calling us.
02Who we work with
Engagements are taken selectively, at the level where the decision is made.
We work with mid-size and enterprise organisations in any industry. They come to us while they are deciding what to do with AI, what it should cost them, and what has to change first before it reaches the P&L.
We work with administrations and public bodies that are under obligation to adopt AI responsibly. They come to us with the concerns first: what the law asks of them, what to demand from a vendor, and who inside the organisation can carry the work.
We work with boards and executive teams who want an independent read before they commit. Our only product is the recommendation. No vendor funds it, and no licence sits behind it.
03Programmes
Each one ends with something the organisation owns: a decision, a working method, a trained team, a defensible position, or an installed system.
A board weighing one call starts at 01. A leadership team that wants its people working starts at 02. An institution under obligation starts at 03. A company already working with AI that wants to go deeper, and wants its teams pulling together, starts at 04.
This is for boards, CIOs and CDOs weighing one specific decision. We prepare beforehand, run a single focused session, and send written recommendations afterwards.
You leave with a ranked portfolio, a defensible position on the decision in front of you, and a named owner against every line.
We survey how your people actually work, then run two hands-on sessions with them. We connect the tools already in the room and build one real team workflow together, on your own tasks and your own data.
You leave with working AI workflows, a prompt library your own team wrote, and a follow-up call thirty days later.
Most organisations read the recent deferrals as a reprieve. The obligations that are already live did not move. Transparency duties have applied since August 2026, and the AI literacy duty since February 2025. What moved is the high-risk classification deadline, and it moved into 2027, which buys preparation time.
We inventory the AI systems you are actually running, classify each one against the Act, and separate what is enforceable today from what lands in 2027. This is a readiness assessment. Your counsel keeps the legal opinion.
You leave with an inventory of your AI systems, a classification against the Act, a gap list ordered by what is already enforceable, and a named owner against every item.
This is for organisations already working with AI that want to go further with it. We sit with the teams over a set period, work through their real workload with them, bring the teams together so that what one of them learns reaches the others, and stay until using AI is ordinary.
You leave with people who use it without being asked, teams that share what they build, and one of your own who can carry it after we go.
You get the seat filled. We carry the Chief AI Officer or Chief Digital Officer remit on a fractional basis: investment sequencing, vendor claims, operating model, governance, and the board reporting that has to stand up afterwards. The mandate runs on a three-month minimum with a quarterly re-prioritisation.
You leave with the function running, every major decision made and documented, and one of your own people being built into the successor from the first month.
3S is your own strategic operating system. We train it once on your world, on your numbers, constraints, history and values. It then weighs every major decision on money, commercial reality, growth and values, and it shows you its reasoning. You chair it.
The architecture is fixed, the knowledge compounds, and the system stays yours. This is the part of the practice that keeps working when nobody from Werchota is in the room.
You leave with an installed executive capability, an operating protocol your team can run, and optional monthly tuning.
Engagements run in German, English or French. We are on site where the decision is made, and the working sessions in between are held remotely. The rate card is available on request. Delivery is capped at two to three days a week, and that cap is what keeps the judgement worth buying.
04Who leads it
Founder, Werchota Group
Shirley Werchota has spent more than fifteen years building and commercialising AI, data and digital capability across global enterprise and high-growth markets, at Accenture, Raiffeisen Bank International, BlueSoft and Orange Business, in banking, telecommunications, industry and financial services.
She has held the Chief Digital Officer seat with a full CIO remit, and the SVP Data, AI and GenAI mandate for DACH and CEE. She coaches boards on AI governance and readiness, and she speaks on AI strategy at European political and economic forums.
She is Austrian with Zimbabwean roots, was born in Tunisia, and grew up across Germany, Burkina Faso, Zambia and Austria. That range is why the practice can work a boardroom in Vienna, a ministry in the Gulf and an operating team in Lagos, and translate accurately between all three.
She has held the Chief Digital Officer seat with a full CIO remit, and the SVP Data, AI & GenAI mandate for DACH and CEE.
Her enterprise track record runs through Accenture, Raiffeisen Bank International, BlueSoft and Orange Business.
She holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Vienna, with formal training in informatics didactics, and a Global Executive MBA from IESE Business School, ranked fourth in the world by the Financial Times.
She speaks and acts as a spokesperson on AI strategy at European political and economic forums.
She works across Europe and CEE, the Gulf, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
She delivers and negotiates in German, English and French.
05The group
What stands at the centre of the group is enablement. The work runs from organisations to professionals, to private people, to families, and to children. That is why the group is built as advisory, publishing, education, enterprise AI transformation and digital products.
The group publishes Data World Adventures, a children's series that teaches data literacy and online privacy. It carries the same conviction at a different altitude: people are entitled to understand the systems that shape their lives, and complexity should never be the thing that keeps them out.
06Contact
A first conversation runs thirty minutes and is a working conversation. It usually resolves more than a proposal would, and it tells both sides quickly whether there is an engagement here worth doing.
Enquiries in German, English or French are equally welcome.