Nadine Hessel | Field Service East

August 10, 2026

9:00 AM Keynote: Trusting the Machine: Human-Centered AI for the Service Workforce

As AI becomes embedded in service operations, the challenge is no longer the technology — it's how people trust it, adopt it, and reshape their roles alongside it. This keynote explores what human-centered AI truly means in service environments, where judgment, relationships, and accountability still matter deeply.

Nadine Hessel, Global Director, Service Operations for FläktGroup combines her expertise as a service leader with her PhD research on human–AI collaboration in service work and focuses on how employees experience working with AI in daily practice. Participants will examine common workforce challenges that emerge when AI enters service workflows, including skepticism, fear of replacement, unclear roles, and over- or under-reliance on algorithms.

Through real-world scenarios, this session creates space to share experiences, surface challenges, and jointly explore what human-centered AI can look like in practice.

Attendees will gain insights to:

Identifying and overcoming trust, adoption, and role-clarity barriers that slow down the effective use of AI in service environments
Understanding what "human-centered AI" means from a workforce perspective
Clarifying and actively shaping the division of labor between humans and AI, ensuring accountability, transparency, and better service outcomes
Diagnosing where AI introductions commonly break down in service work and understand approaches to avoid resistance, rework, and value leakage