In 2026, Valentin Binnendijk walked into a software firm and found a product department with almost zero AI experience. Decades of deep engineering knowledge. Near-zero agentic practice. That room is the DACH mid-market, and it tells you the real blocker is not regulation. It is leadership and culture.

Valentin co-founded TrekkSoft and STARTUPS.CH and has spent two decades digitising analogue businesses into SaaS. He now builds hyper-lean product teams that ship more with fewer people. In this episode, we get specific about how.

We cover:

• Where vibe coding stops and agentic engineering starts, and why the difference is not the model but the process
• Why the bottleneck moved from the engineering team to leadership and product management
• The three-step build after leadership buy-in: extract the knowledge, map the security risk, build a real test suite of thousands of scenarios
• How to put agentic transformation on a CFO's P&L, the cost-saving case and the survival case
• Why public markets punished narrow single-use-case software companies with 40 to 50 percent valuation cuts
• Where it breaks: talent, unrealistic expectations, and the “can I just buy it” trap

This is a practical conversation for founders, GTM and product leaders at B2B software companies who need to move from talking about AI to operating with it.

The host, Marc Gasser, works at the intersection of product and go-to-market.