Özgür Kartal is a professional with international experience having a strong interest in AI and sales.
As such, he is currently working as an AI Sales Specialist in Central Europe at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and is responsible for high-performance- and AI-based solutions from HPE.
In his first year, he reached a sales performance of over 100%. He was then assigned for international accounts in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland & Turkey, driving the sales opportunities as Sales Lead. His customers are active in key industries including IT, telco, public, service providers.
His motivation for this job is to accelerate the AI momentum by providing suitable AI solutions for his clients and partners. He is an active member of strategic projects and contributes to HPE‘s AI Go-To-Market strategies. He closely works together business development managers, solution architects, product managers and professional services.
In his recent role, Özgür worked as Program Manager at the Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence (hessian.AI) and was responsible for the AI Accelerator program. His role was to evaluate new AI businesses and coach talented people in AI startups on defining go-to-market strategies, building customer relationships, investment readiness, and preparing for international market entry.
Özgür also worked as a (tech) salesperson at IBM, where he was responsible for presales revenue of € 6.0m p.a. of IT infrastructure / hybrid cloud products (IBM Storage Portfolio, hard- and software). He built relationships with more than 20 partners and customers, from IT decision-makers up to C-Level. He learned sales from scratch in a six-month at IBM Global Sales, and his sales work at IBM (double 100% sales target achievements) was honored by his selection to the IBM Top Talent Leadership Program 2022.
In parallel to his work, he is an affiliated PhD candidate at The University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU), conducting research on human-AI collaboration. He is currently investigating the influence of people’s overestimation of their AI knowledge on the acceptance of AI tools.
Özgür received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in industrial engineering from the Technical University of Darmstadt and completed 2020 his final thesis at the Institute of Information Systems. He gained industry experience for almost three years at IBM Deutschland GmbH, he worked abroad at Robert Bosch as a Sales Intern in Singapore and at Deutsche Bahn as a Student Project Engineer.