Panel
Fast Company Turkey’s Digital Transformation Summit 2025 addressed technology, artificial intelligence, and sectoral transformations.
Rauf Ateş (Founder of Fast Company Turkey)
“Today, until 11:30-12:00, we will be discussing technology, artificial intelligence, and various topics that come to mind when we talk about digitalization. We will go as far as health, and the use of technology and artificial intelligence in healthcare. We have important guests during this period. We also have the covers of our new issue, which I will share for those who haven’t yet seen them. In the coming days, on November 26th, we will bring together startups and corporate companies, on December 4th, we have the CXO Council meeting, and on December 17th, we will focus on digital currency and fintech. Our main sponsor is Turkcell, and there has been a significant investment from Google Cloud. Turkcell will invest $1 billion, and I believe Google will invest a similar amount to establish a regional cloud center. Best of luck to them.”
Gürkan Arpacı (General Manager, Turkcell Digital Business Services)
Speech Title: Technologies Shaping Our Future
“Digital Business Services has a 10-year history. We can state that we have reached a significant market share in the information technologies sector (Cloud Computing, Data Center, IoT, Cybersecurity, System Integration, professional services), beyond telecommunications.
5G and AIoT:
What does 5G bring with it? While previously in 4G, only thousands of sensors per square kilometer could signal simultaneously, we are now moving towards a new point called Massive Machine Type Communication, where up to 1 million sensors per square kilometer can connect simultaneously. This means that a layer of intelligence has arrived in Turkey as a technological revolution.
Sectoral Reflections:
- Smart Factories: We want minimum cost loss, zero defects. We have now reached a stage where we can realize automation and robotic processes.
- Energy Management: With the entry of renewable energy sources into the picture, the moment we can balance supply and demand, we will both optimize our costs and be able to send our resources sufficiently to all those in need.
- Healthcare: Remote surgery, performing medical interventions. There is an aspect that touches human health with the early and proactive flow of data the moment a person enters the hospital.
Cloud Computing and Strategic Breakthrough:
Up until now, we had been providing local cloud services. Now, bringing all services to Turkey together with Google Cloud is a revolution as big as 5G. The biggest feature of the structure called Three Availability Zones (AZ) is that we will be able to bring the entire service framework (cybersecurity, AI processing power) to Turkey. In the future, we will have the opportunity to showcase much more technological performance in Turkey that we could not achieve before.
Barriers to Artificial Intelligence:
AI is at the point of being the greatest invention since the introduction of the internet. However, there are two major barriers to its use: the lack of finding the Business Value (expression of value) and Data. If you don’t ‘torture’ the data enough, it won’t speak. Serious work is needed to intellectualize the data and derive value from it.
Sustainability:
Climate crisis is the issue moving from second to first place in the World Economic Forum’s reports. We aim to achieve our renewable energy target of 300 MW by the end of 2026.”
Agentic AI and Corporate Transformation
Cenk Erdoğan (Head of Business Development at MOBEN and Prometa AI)
Panel: Agentic AI Transformation
“Agentic AI is essentially a new phase in the development of AI. We are now talking about an artificial intelligence that not only analyzes information but “takes action”. It can understand the goal, make a plan, implement it, and similarly, repeat this cycle by learning from it. The main difference lies in the automation of the decision. Companies now have to consider, ‘How can I create a process where the AI can work, where the AI sits at the center and automatically makes decisions?’
Human and AI Collaboration:
When we talk about AI managing the process, it makes the AI an organizational actor, an employee. Human employees, on the other hand, know the context, relationships, and company priorities. AI makes the decisions, and the human directs it. In the coming period, each of our roles will change to be about shaping the AI.
Scaling Barriers:
About 90% of companies use AI, but only about 30% say they generate value from it. Essentially, our corporate muscles are not strong enough to guide the AI correctly. The biggest problem is that projects cannot move from the POC (Proof of Concept) stage to results. To solve this, an Agentic AI Mesh (an integrated ecosystem) needs to be established.
Leadership:
Everyone who works with AI knows this: asking the right question and being able to establish the context is the most important issue. When we look at leadership, clarity and building trust in AI (they must first trust it themselves) are very important.”
Understanding the New Era: From Economy to Application
Burak Aydın (President of Technology and Digital Business Development Group, Zorlu Holding)
Panel: Understanding the New Era
“Artificial intelligence is not an intermediate technology; it is one of the core technologies, like the emergence of the internet. The value it creates is very real and very measurable. The World Trade Organization says that global trade will increase by 34% to 37% with AI support until 2040. The future tells us that all work done with artificial intelligence will be redefined, and new jobs and new processes will emerge.
Zorlu Holding Approach:
We have started to redefine ourselves. We are revisiting our processes and work with artificial intelligence. We are working to implement more than 400 use cases within the YAZ (Y and Z of Artificial Intelligence) program. We expect every dashboard to have a financial or strategic output. They say 70% of the work is culture/people, and 30% is technology; we are currently focusing entirely on the culture part.”
Mehmet Ali Tombalak (President, TÜBİSAD)
Panel: Understanding the New Era
“We project that the technology sector in Turkey will grow by 10% this year. Is this a good thing? No. Why not? Because to be a technology player in Turkey, we need to grow at least twofold. Our exports are $3.5 billion. The entire sector cannot even equal a city like Kayseri. In the coming period, instead of small companies saying “‘let it be small but mine,'” we must grow with “scale-ups”.
Artificial intelligence is not a bubble; it is the third revolutionary transformation. What can we do? Should we develop Chat GPT? No. That burns $5 billion a year. What can we do? “We can be the technology player of this region.” Because we are the safest, most competent (over 300,000 technical personnel), and most scalable country. Our potential, due to being a manufacturing country, is to develop “vertical (sectoral) solutions” with artificial intelligence. For the first time, we have the potential to compete equally with Europe. The only thing we need is to “create brand companies from our country, accompanied by a collective mobilization.””
Süreyya Bayraktaroğlu (Chief Grocery Marketing Leader, Migros One)
Panel: Understanding the New Era
“We are truly a company where data and artificial intelligence can be used much more directly. The Migros application is an ecosystem that receives more than 100 million orders annually and has 2.5 million daily traffic. It is not easy to manually monitor such a high volume.
“Personalization:” The critical thing for us is the data pool and the need for this data to be read correctly. We have an algorithm that generates attractive offers for my users on a person-by-person basis. We offer “ready basket suggestions” within the application, and the rate at which customers add and purchase the suggested basket with a single click is 60%. This shows how well we know the customer.
“Operational Efficiency:” We perform “robotic picking” in warehouses. A mechanism works to find the fastest picking route for the robots and determine which orders contain which products, and which ones to combine for faster collection. With this, we achieved significant speed efficiency, which resulted in a reduction in delayed orders. We develop these internally and “present them to global giants”. Our goal is to sell them to the world.”
Finance and Cybersecurity
Bayram Tuzcu (CEO, Ziraat Teknoloji) and Mehmet Zahit Ateş (CIO, Central Bank of Turkey – TCMB)
Panel: Transformation in Finance
“Bayram Tuzcu:” “Artificial intelligence has started to move beyond competition to a state of existence. Ziraat Mobil is the 3rd most used mobile application in Turkey, with over 24.5 million digital active customers. We use artificial intelligence to increase efficiency in operational processes and strengthen our risk management modules, starting from customer communication and management. Our employees see that AI makes their lives easier in areas such as reading handwriting on checks and promissory notes and interpreting customer notifications. In the next 3 years, AI will create serious added value in customer contact with assistants capable of providing financial consultancy.”
“Mehmet Zahit Ateş:” “As the Central Bank, we are responsible for price stability, and we are researching the impact of artificial intelligence on the economy in areas such as labor and growth. With FAST in payment systems, we send money end-to-end in 0.3 seconds, and this brings fraud incidents with it. In this scenario, AI provides “proactive” management, not reactive, with anomaly detection and early warning systems. As a regulatory institution, we believe that regulation will evolve to be near-real-time. On the personnel side, we see that AI (assistant/employee) dulls our competencies like translation or summarization, but people give feedback saying, ‘It’s a good thing you saved us from these tasks.’ In the future, competitive advantage comes from “improving data quality and configuring the architecture completely suitable for AI.””
Ali Rıza Aydın (Denizbank) and Cem Kotanoğlu (CEO, Secure Future)
Panel: Secure Transformation Strategies
“Ali Rıza Aydın:” “Cybersecurity is not a braking mechanism; it is an “accelerator”. If you want to go fast, you must have strong brakes. You have to think of it like a race car. Bank assets can be measured by a line of code or a tweet. That’s why risk management is critical. When getting a cybersecurity budget, you can receive full support not by frightening people, but by demonstrating “how our work enables the organization to perform a certain business function.””
“Cem Kotanoğlu:” “You are only as strong as the weakest link in the chain. Organizations that cannot maintain staff must definitely seek external support. Norms need to be established to increase quality in cybersecurity. CEOs cannot ignore cybersecurity in a world where over 90% of transactions are done digitally.”
New Generation Leadership and Transformation in Health
Melisa Sabancı Tapan (Board Member, Sabancı Holding)
Panel: New Generation Leadership
“I started with a general curiosity inherited from my grandfather, Sakıp Sabancı. My grandfather wondered how technology would affect human life, and I wonder “how we will remain human in a world with technology.” We created a model by bringing Sakıp Sabancı’s archive into the present day using LLM technology. To increase this model’s interaction with his admirers, we created a podcast series (AYSU).
“3 Critical Issues of AI:”
- “Values:” How can we protect compassion, empathy, and fairness with artificial intelligence? Even the World Economic Forum believes that the human-centric approach should be integrated into all processes.
- “Infrastructure:” The energy consumption of data centers is increasing. We must question what energy the data is presented to us with.
- “Equity:” Artificial intelligence integrates the biases of the people who train it. In the business world, if diversity is not integrated into the model, AI will reproduce the same types of people based on past data and “replicate inequality.”
“My Agenda:” I prioritize focusing again on consent-based data usage and values like “mindfulness and being present” that are being lost in today’s world.”
Professor Doctor Derya Onutmaz (The Jackson Laboratory)
Panel: AI Transformation and the New Era in Health
“I believe that almost everything will become artificial intelligence in the coming years. Thanks to artificial intelligence, “there will be no disease we cannot treat” within 10-15 years. After that, it will start to “reverse the aging process.” People will be able to live healthily for hundreds of years.
Biomedical Revolution:
Biological systems are incredibly complex systems. By analyzing each person’s data (genetics, metabolism, immune system) through artificial intelligence, personalized treatment will be possible very soon.
“Google Co-Scientist Example:” This model, configured as an agentic system, reads information that you would read in 500 years in a few hours and generates thousands of hypotheses. In our own lab, the AI predicted 90% of the results of an experiment that took a month in 5-10 minutes. This incredibly speeds up the experimentation process.
“Digital Twin:” If we can process the trillions of data points in our body, artificial intelligence will be able to create a complete simulation of your biology. At that point, knowing how a drug will affect your liver or heart within seconds, it will implement “preventive and personalized treatment.””
CEO Vision 26: Smart Mobility and Global Competition
Berrin Özselçuk (General Manager, Amazon Web Services)
“There is a huge opportunity globally, and for Turkey, there is an opportunity to create at least $100 billion in economic value over the next 5 to 8 years. Research shows that 76% of senior executives have an AI strategy, but only 30% have defined a clear roadmap. Today, we will discuss how these clear roadmaps can be determined.”
Gürcan Karakaş (CEO, TOGG)
“Our goal, passion, and rhetoric from the very beginning has been “more than just a car”. Mobility is gradually becoming very different from just moving from A to B. This device we call a car is slowly becoming smart, connecting to the whole world via the Internet of Things, and turning into a smart device. This allows us to transform into a mobility experience that simplifies our lives and provides benefits.
TOGG’s Product:
Our first product is not a car, nor is it a smart device; our first product is a genuinely digital product. We first introduced a digital experience platform (“Trumore”). We sold 77 thousand vehicles, but the Trumore application has 3 million downloads and over 400 thousand financial service accounts.
Our Business Verticals:
- “Born Smart and Electrified” (Smart mobility devices)
- “Born Digital” (Digital experience platform)
- “Born Sustainable” (Clean energy solutions)
AI Application:
We have an infrastructure called “CenAI” that we developed with Microsoft. This is a structure configured with an Agentic logic, having learned how to solve our technical knowledge that took weeks, and over 2 million service requests. As a result, it can solve problems and provide information quickly (around 35-40%), more accurately and clearly. This simplifies our lives.
The Future of Automotive:
The automotive industry will not end. Did the phone industry end? No. But the end will come for some of them. This will ultimately transform into a mobility system; just making a car will not be enough. The company with the strongest ecosystem is the company that earns the most cash. We are not sending you a new model every 3 years for 100 years, but a new model every day (with updates).
Armando Guastella (Partner, Bain & Company)
“The AI goals of senior executives in Turkey are definitely aligned with global goals—even bolder. However, we see inconsistencies in transferring this strategy to lower management levels (in implementation and roadmap creation).
Approach to AI:
For Turkey, it is necessary to shift from tactical AI applications (customer service, IT) to long-term strategic applications. Turkey’s labor cost advantage of the past decades has ended. AI will force all companies to rethink their operations and processes. This is an opportunity to create a competitive advantage.
Talent:
While the difficulty of finding talent is global, Turkey is in a very suitable position to embrace this change with its young and educated population. Building from scratch rather than adapting existing infrastructure can provide Turkey with a significant advantage for AI solutions.”
Closing and General Assessment
Berrin Özselçuk (General Manager, Amazon Web Services)
“We have received information that 9 out of 10 people hired in 2026 will be sought for AI competency. Furthermore, 60% of companies have a ‘Chief AI Officer’ position, and 26% plan to add it in 2026. After discussing generative artificial intelligence all day, I believe we must put these topics on our agenda. Thank you for your contributions.”
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