RESEARCH
The question vendors don’t ask.
My doctoral research examines how artificial intelligence and blockchain are reshaping the Swiss economy, with a focus on the question most vendors skip: will people trust, adopt and rely on these technologies?
RESEARCH THEMES
What I study
AI & blockchain in the Swiss economy
The subject of my doctoral research: how both technologies are changing Swiss businesses and institutions.
Trust and adoption
Why technologies that work in a pilot stall in practice, and what earns lasting confidence from users and organisations.
Decentralized infrastructure
Separating durable opportunity from noise in DePIN, from feasibility to governance.
Cyber resilience
How critical infrastructure withstands availability attacks, and how AI is changing both attack and defence.
PUBLICATIONS
Selected work
BOOK CHAPTER · SPRINGER · 2025
Large Language Models und KI-gestützte Bots in der Patientenreise
Sophie Hundertmark & Massimiliano Decarli (Hochschule Luzern). In: M. A. Pfannstiel (ed.), Künstliche Intelligenz im Einsatz für die erfolgreiche Patientenreise, Springer, pp. 781 to 804.
How chatbots and voice assistants built on large language models support patients before, during and after a hospital visit. The chapter covers retrieval augmented generation on organisation specific data, a practical implementation path from needs assessment to prompt engineering, and the data protection and security questions that come with clinical use. (In German.)
SURVEY STUDY · SWITZERLAND
AI adoption, trust and concern among residents and businesses in Ticino
Massimiliano Decarli & Sophie Hundertmark (Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, HSLU) · October 2024
Study summary: Italian · German. Press coverage: Ticinonline · Corriere del Ticino
A survey of 116 respondents on how AI services are used in Ticino and which concerns accompany that use. Nearly nine in ten respondents use AI services and three in four use them both at work and privately, yet privacy and reliability remain the dominant concerns.
87%
use AI services in some form
42.6%
use them every day
75.6%
use AI both at work and in private life
CONFERENCE PAPER · EUROMED ACADEMY OF BUSINESS · 2022
Application of artificial intelligence in strategic marketing decision making processes
Maria Viktoria Mauz, Gilberto Mendez Cordero, Massimiliano Decarli & Michael Neubert. 15th Annual Conference of the EuroMed Academy of Business.
A multiple case study built on interviews with 13 experts and 9 corporate cases. AI makes strategic marketing decisions faster and better informed, but users demand transparency and reject fully autonomous decisions. The paper proposes a framework in which AI predicts the likely outcomes of a decision while humans keep the final call.
WORKING PAPER · 2021
Internationalisation patterns of European mobile network operators
Massimiliano Decarli & Michael Neubert. United International Business Schools (UIBS).
A multiple case study of how Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Vodafone and Telefónica expand abroad, tested against the Uppsala model and the CAGE distance framework. The operators enter markets mainly through acquisitions, and administrative and political proximity from historical ties often outweighs geographic or cultural distance. State ownership tends to slow expansion; private ownership speeds it up.
Interested in the research?
I welcome conversations with fellow researchers, institutions and organisations who want to put these findings to work.