EP 5 – Why the future of AI depends on process management with Carina Siemen

In this episode, Liam O’Neill speaks with Carina Siemen, Global Quality Systems Leader at Nexperia, where she leads global quality systems, process improvement and digital transformation across a highly complex international manufacturing environment.

Carina’s route into process and quality management is not a conventional one. Before moving into aviation, operational excellence and global quality leadership, she started her career in fast food, managing restaurant operations at 19 and opening a brand new restaurant as a manager at 22. It was there, long before she formally studied quality management, that she first learned what process really means under pressure.

This is a practical and wide-ranging conversation about why process is fundamentally about enabling scale, why so many organisations misunderstand quality management, and why AI is about to make process governance more important rather than less.

They discuss:

  •  Why fast food taught Carina more about process management than most corporate environments, and how operating under real-world pressure shaped the way she still thinks about standardisation, execution and scale today 
  •  Why standardisation, when done properly, creates freedom rather than bureaucracy, and how clear processes allow organisations to move faster without losing consistency 
  •  What the business world still gets wrong about quality management, and why many organisations become “audit-ready but operationally fragile” by focusing too heavily on compliance, documentation and approvals 
  •  Why process improvement only works when the people doing the work are involved in designing it, and how communication, operational credibility and stakeholder alignment determine whether change actually succeeds 
  •  How Carina approaches process and quality systems by starting with how work actually flows through the business first, then mapping standards onto that reality afterwards 
  •  Why AI agents still require clear rules, governance and process frameworks to operate effectively, and how process repositories are becoming a critical organisational asset in the age of AI 
  •  The difference between uncontrolled AI data environments and governed process knowledge, and why organisations with clean, trusted process frameworks will have a major advantage as AI adoption accelerates 
  •  How Carina’s team built an AI-powered internal process chatbot, why prompting AI is fundamentally different from using Google, and what organisations need to do if they want employees to use AI effectively rather than become frustrated by it 

 

This episode is particularly relevant for anyone working in process management, quality, operational excellence, transformation or digital change. Especially those trying to understand how AI, governance and process thinking are starting to converge in large organisations.

Host: Liam O’Neill, Managing Director at bpmd

Guest: Carina Siemen, Global Quality Systems Leader at Nexperia