You spend decades building a business, and much of what you know was never written down. It did not need to be. You were always there.
A mid-sized family business in Germany faced that question during its succession. Its tax advisor, Elisa Lutz of awicontax, helped it find an answer, as Haufe reported in July 2026.
What the family business and awicontax did
Lutz and the client developed an AI agent together. It regularly interviews the senior owner and documents his experience, and it serves the successor as a digital point of contact. What began with tax and corporate law questions grew into one knowledge source that links tax and legal documents, contracts and company knowledge.
The system runs inside the client's own IT. Lutz designed the concept, the guardrails and the system prompts, including rules for uncertainty so the AI does not invent answers when information is missing. In her words: "The AI agent is a sparring partner for both of them. It regularly gathers knowledge from the senior, some of which has never been documented anywhere, and the junior can call up everything at any time by talking to his AI agent on his smartphone." The article reports no figures.
What it already gives the business
The successor gets the senior owner's experience on demand, in the owner's own words, while the senior is still there to correct it.
The design choices are sound: the client's own infrastructure, an advisor who sets the rules and an explicit instruction not to guess.
The ExValu perspective, a hypothesis
Where a Company Brain could take it next
Interviews capture what the owner remembers to say. The next step is linking his answers to the decisions they explain: why a customer gets special terms, why a supplier was kept, why an investment was postponed.
A Company Brain could connect those reasons across documents and people, so the successor and key staff all draw on the same memory. That is our hypothesis, and the article does not describe it.
What an owner and a buyer would look for
Track how many key decisions are documented with their reasons and how often the successor still needs the senior owner.
A buyer, or a bank financing a succession, wants to see that the business does not depend on one person's memory. Interview recordings are personal data, so agree in writing how they are stored, used and deleted.
The problem behind this case
Facing the same problem?
About this analysis
* The image is AI-generated and does not show staff of the family business or awicontax. The facts and figures on this page come from the published source named below.
This is an independent ExValu analysis of a published case. Facts, figures and names are as reported in the source below, which our team checked on October 12, 2026. The ideas for next steps are our own perspective and make no claim about conditions inside A family business advised by awicontax. To request a correction or removal, write to [email protected]. Quotes from the German-language source are translated by our team.
Primary source: Independent trade journalism, Haufe, July 2026. Available at www.haufe.de/steuern/taxulting/wie-steuerberatungskanzleien-ki-agenten-nutzen_598848_690950.html.