Jan Romportl, PhD

My services

I offer a wide scope of AI-related services that you can explore on my website including prices. Here’s a brief overview:

• 90-minute online consultation — We can discuss any AI-related topic that fits in 90 minutes, from career and business strategies to technical and theoretical topics.
• Talks, lectures, and workshops — I often give keynotes and talks at conferences, lectures for target audiences (almost any combination on the business—academic and layman—professional scales), and half-day workshops. I also provide fully customized 1-3 day workshops for companies, as well as a limited number of free and pro-bono talks or lectures for universities, non-profits, and other social impact cases.
• AI deep dive — Comprehensive and detailed consulting with a deep dive into your issues is excellent for complex topics and projects. Pricing is based on the scale of the project.
• AI audit
• You’ll get an honest and straightforward external opinion on the real state of AI in your company. You’ll know where exactly you’re standing in terms of AI, your blindspots and untapped potential. I can also assess the ethical and fairness issues of your machine learning models with regard to the future EU AI Act.
• I’ll be absolutely open and direct in all our discussions, even when it comes to potentially painful internal topics. You’ll also get a comprehensive written report from me.
• With my help, you’ll be able to avoid fudging, the hesitance of some internal stakeholders, as well as “AI vendors” selling you snake oil. I will also protect you from the mumbo jumbo of big consulting companies who will in reality try to deploy inexperienced juniors for astronomic man-day rates.
• The pricing depends on the size of your company and whether you want me to include the ethics assessment and your level of readiness for the EU AI Act.
• AI strategy
• You and your key stakeholders will receive a meaningful AI strategy for your company that will not only help your business grow, but will also make it more resilient in the uncertain future and include your readiness for the EU AI Act and ethical compliance.
• In this process, you will have me fully on your side, not representing any particular product or vendor. I will shape your AI strategy so that it will NOT become a bottomless black hole of expensive man-days of various outsourced or bodyshopped consultants, data scientists, and engineers. Instead, I will guide you in building your own in-house highly skilled and sustainable team that can hands-on execute your AI strategy. Or if you still need an external temporary team, I’ll be their watchdog who cannot be duped by a smart-sounding talk with lots of technical buzzwords. And if your best AI strategy is not to have AI at all, you’ll know this from me soon enough.
• The pricing depends on the size of your company, and it is also suitable for small and medium businesses.
• One-off in-person consultation — This is a one-on-one session where we can look more deeply under the hood of similar topics as in the online session. (I do these mostly in Prague and Pilsen, Czechia, but also can do so elsewhere with travel expenses covered.)

About me

I have almost 20 years of expertise as an AI researcher, entrepreneur, consultant, and executive. I'm also a runner, PADI divemaster, private pilot, philosopher, and a lifelong Atari enthusiast and vintage computer collector.

Academic career

If you had asked me ten years ago where I envisaged my professional future, I would have said I wanted to become a prominent AI researcher in academia. Sure enough, I was still full of academic idealism at that time.

I conducted great research projects in the area of man-machine interaction, I was the head of a university department, I had a Ph.D. in AI, a master's in cybernetics, and another master's in philosophy, and I had just returned from an academic visit to Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. And I wanted to save the world.

However, the local academic treadmill of publish-or-perish culture turned out to be very distant from the real-world impacts I had imagined. So, in 2015, I decided to take a leap of faith and leave my senior academic and management positions at the university to join a corporation as a chief data scientist in O2 Czech Republic.

PPF and O2 Czech Republic

You may wonder why O2. I'll tell you. Because PPF at the time had recently acquired O2 and was damn well situated in the CEE region to make a real impact on things. They had no AI and very scattered and inefficient data science and big data teams here and there. So, I thought, what if we fix it? And why not build excellent AI competencies in O2 and PPF?

Dataclair.ai – center for artificial intelligence

Fast forward seven years to the spring of 2022, I was the founder and CEO of Dataclair — O2 and the PPF Center of AI Excellence. Dataclair has a fantastic team of 40 individuals and is making an impact in various industries, including telecommunications, finance and banking, media, transportation and mobility, ethical machine learning and privacy, and even oncology research.

I had wonderful teammates and wonderful people I reported to, and I learned so much from them. I had completed my mission. So, where should I head next?

Helping people with all things AI

How can I create an even greater impact? I want to help as many people as possible to prepare their businesses and lives for the world pervaded by AI. And I don't just mean technical and business AI. I take these for granted. I truly mean “all things AI,” which includes social, psychological, future-oriented, and risk-related aspects too.

That's why I decided to go the freelance way and dedicate one part of it to helping individual clients. So, now we can join our journeys through direct personal contact.

The AI community and startup projects

The other part of my current professional life is devoted to developing AI startup initiatives with significant societal impact. This is a natural continuation of my long-standing passion for safe, ethical, and useful AI. It stems from the same reasons that I cooperate with the Centre for Theoretical Studies at Charles University and the Czech Effective Altruism Group, as well as why I organize the Prague AI Safety Meetup.

Furthermore, I do my best to be helpful to the Czech AI Safety and Alignment community and I am involved in the global movement for the minimization of existential risks.