R

I build AI companies.

I'm Thomas Ragger, co-founder and CEO of wild, a fully remote product and technology studio. I grew it from four people to more than thirty, with a 35x increase in revenue and clients from Red Bull to Anthropic, and led it through its exit into Residence. My focus is empathetic AI, products people can trust in places where mistakes matter.

Work

4 entries
01

wild

Co-founded wild and led it as CEO, fully remote from the start. We grew from four people to more than thirty, with a 35x increase in revenue, and became a design and technology partner to global brands before the exit into Residence in 2023. The team's work for Red Bull, IKEA, Google, Meta and Disney has won 11 Cannes Lions, 21 Awwwards including Site of the Year, 20 FWA and 2 Webbys. More recently the studio has worked with AI companies including Anthropic, Microsoft, IBM, Replit, Inflection AI and Serve Robotics.

wild.as since 2013
02

Austria's first financial AI

As the bank's external sparring partner, led the team that built the earliest prototypes of Austria's first financial AI and helped shape its path to production, working alongside the bank's in-house teams. We brought memory into the assistant early, built a knowledge pipeline that legal and compliance can verify, tiered answers by branch and location, and made voice prototypes the CEO demoed live on stage.

Erste Bank since 2023
03

Brand Context Protocol

Context engineering for brands. An open harness that makes a company legible to models, turning its voice, design and rules into context, with scoring and feedback loops that keep the judgment in the system.

craft.wild.as 2026
04

Warm Fuzzy Story Club

A design-forward consumer product my wife and I built end to end, together with illustrators rather than instead of them. Artists design the styles and share in every book sold. You upload a few photos, describe your story, and a printed picture book comes back.

Product 2025

Writing

3 entries
01

AI that survives reality

Decision-level notes from building a financial AI inside a regulated bank, condensed from the whitepaper we published on AI in regulated industries.

Field notes 2026
02

Taste is the whole job

Notes on the Brand Context Protocol: why brands need a machine-readable home for their judgment, and why it must live in files they own.

craft.wild.as/bcp 2026
03

Yo Wall-E

From an Amazon toy kit to an autonomous companion with eyes, ears, a voice and four personalities. What building a robot with zero electronics experience taught me about working with AI.

Personal project 2026

Talks

5 entries
01

Return to Human

What creative teams do when technology removes the old production constraints.

JETZT Summit keynote, Vienna 2026
02

Creative Industries in an AI World

Panel "CollaborAItion": where do we go from here, war stories included.

CIMIx main stage, Vienna 2026
03

AI and creativity

What generative models change about creative work, for Austria's national AI factory.

AI Factory Austria Vienna 2026
04

AI m[eats] creativity?

Impulse talk on AI in creative business models, brand-loyal agents, hyper-personalization, and brand-compliant tools at scale.

Creative Region Linz 2024
05

Scaling Taste

Curation, quality and differentiation when anyone can generate anything.

ADCE AI Creative Summit Barcelona 2025

How I work

4 entries
01

Build to find out

I prototype before I form an opinion. The robot and the first bank prototype both started that way.

02

Production over demos

A product earns trust once it runs live, where failures have consequences and fixes are visible.

03

Codify your process

Taste in one person's head doesn't scale, so we write it down as rules the whole team can check their work against.

04

People make the calls

Models produce options faster than ever, but deciding what goes live is still a human job.

Lab

4 prototypes · drag

I still build something most weeks. It keeps me close to how the tools actually behave.

If you're building AI products people can trust, in places where mistakes matter, talk to me. hi@thomasragger.com