Dennis, how did you come to Inventx and what is your role with us?
After my IT apprenticeship and vocational baccalaureate with a technical focus at the Chur Commercial Vocational School, I started out as a system administrator at an IT service provider in the region. However, since my plans for a part-time degree program couldn’t be realized there, a new opportunity opened up for me at Inventx: I was able to join as a Systems Engineer with a focus on cloud and, in parallel, start my studies at the University of Applied Sciences Graubünden—at exactly the right time, when the new degree program was launched there. Up to now, I have worked at Inventx in the Technology Services area and have mainly dealt with topics around Azure and the Digital Workplace.
How have you progressed with your studies over the past few years?
Inventx supports professional development. I have full support from the team, my supervisors, and HR. When a mandatory professional internship came up as part of my studies, I was able to complete it at Inventx and came into contact with our InventxLab for the first time. Urs Rhyner and Carla Caspar took me “under their wing,” and as part of my internship I was allowed to work on an internal Azure-based chatbot that enabled us to make internal know-how for the SYRIUS insurance platform more easily accessible. Now that I’m writing my bachelor’s thesis, I once again have the opportunity to deepen my expertise as part of a project for the InventxLab and to expand my knowledge in a targeted way.
What do your studies in Computational and Data Science and the InventxLab have to do with each other?
FHGR quickly recognized that, with advances in AI technologies, demand for data and computer specialists who can work with these tools will rise sharply. From the very beginning, the university and Inventx entered into a partnership in which theory and practice are interwoven for mutual benefit. InventxLab has been experimenting with AI for a long time—large and also small language models, conversational AI, agentic AI, or other data-driven applications. And Carla is an outstanding data scientist whose experience and open manner make professional exchange particularly valuable—her input is moving my bachelor’s thesis forward decisively. While the degree program covers AI very broadly, Inventx’s AI focus is primarily on application possibilities for its two core industries, banking and insurance.
And what is your bachelor’s thesis about?
My thesis addresses a highly pressing topic for banks and insurers: security. By using AI models, the enormous flood of information on cyber threats can be filtered more efficiently and accurately to identify those with the highest relevance and greatest risk. The goal of my project is to develop an agentic-AI prototype for AI-supported threat intelligence that will in future support our Inventx Cyber Resilience Center. I want to identify the most effective models for classifying threat data and help ensure that this prototype can then be implemented technically and used operationally in ix.CRC for our customers. At the same time, this work supports my personal development path as an engineer, with further specialization and a deepening of my knowledge and practical experience.
Thank you, Dennis, for the conversation, and best of luck with completing your thesis and your studies.
