Marek Kowalkiewicz (born 21 July 1978 in Kołobrzeg, Poland) is a Polish-Australian computer scientist. He is associated with the Poznań University of Economics and Business and Queensland University of Technology (QUT), where he is a professor and chair in digital economy.^[1] His research focuses on artificial intelligence (AI), digital transformation strategies for government and industry, machine learning, and natural language processing.^[1]

Kowalkiewicz joined QUT from Silicon Valley, where he led global innovation teams for SAP; he was also a Research Manager at SAP's Machine Learning Lab in Singapore, global research program lead at SAP Research Australia, and a research fellow at Microsoft Research Asia. He performs all of his research in 30-day "research innovation sprints", an award-winning concept he pioneered at QUT in 2015.^[2] These research sprints are designed to create and accelerate industry-focused research outcomes by combining the commercial philosophy of Google's five-day design sprint with the rigour of academic research.^[4]

He is the author of the book The Economy of Algorithms: Rise of the Digital Minions, published by La Trobe University Press in March 2024.^[6,38] The book has received multiple awards for its contribution to the rapidly evolving field of AI.^[7]

In 2007, he joined SAP Research Australia as a senior researcher and development expert leading teams of developers and researchers across various projects, including the 2010 launch of the first SAP app in the AppStore, AUS Traffic, which led to SAP's focus on mobile apps and its Apple partnership.^[12] He also led the IdeaWall project (previously known as InnoBoard), a remote collaboration app that helped distributed teams work with physical and virtual post-it notes, a concept that is still used in some internal SAP applications.^[13] While at SAP Research, Kowalkiewicz was appointed Global Research Program Manager, User Experience, where he established a global user experience research team and program. He also led a global series of SAP InnoJam hackathons which promoted the use of SAP technologies by startups, and won SAP TechEd DemoJams in Las Vegas and Bangalore with demonstrations of augmented reality (AR) in enterprise systems.^[14,15]

In April 2012, Kowalkiewicz moved to Singapore to help establish SAP Research's Asia-Pacific Japan (APJ) headquarters. As research manager and head of developer outreach for APJ, he created SAP's first machine learning research lab.^[5,16]

In 2014, he was appointed senior director, products and innovation, at SAP Americas in Palo Alto, California. Kowalkiewicz was global content and strategy lead for SAP's largest internal conference series, d-kom, where he designed and launched its annual, global developer kick-off event for more than 25,000 attendees. He also built a network of makerspaces for SAP developers, introducing AR/VR, 3D printing, and robotics.

Kowalkiewicz was an SAP mentor in their SAP Influencer Program from 2013 to 2018.^[17] According to SAP's website, SAP Mentors are "Top influencers in the SAP ecosystem, representing customers, partners, and consultants."^[18]

In 2015, Kowalkiewicz was appointed professor and PwC Chair in Digital Economy at Queensland University of Technology (QUT).^[19] This joint venture between QUT, PwC, Brisbane Marketing and the Queensland Government was a five-year research initiative that enabled collaboration between industry, academia and government and was tasked with "designing digital transformation strategies for complex economic and social challenges". From 2016 to 2019, Kowalkiewicz was Research Theme Lead: Embracing the Digital Age.^[28]

In 2016, Kowalkiewicz was a member of the Opportunities for Personalised Transport Review Taskforce guiding the Queensland Government on developing new ride-sharing regulation.^[24] The newDemocracy Foundation ranked the regulation, dubbed "Legalising Uber," as one of the leading evidence-based policy initiatives of the year following reports by Per Capita and the Institute of Public Affairs.^[26,25]

In 2020, Kowalkiewicz co-founded the Queensland AI Hub in collaboration with Queensland's government, universities and industry leaders, established during the COVID-19 crisis to improve Queensland's AI capability.^[30,29,31] In 2020, Kowalkiewicz established the QUT Centre for the Digital Economy as its founding director.^[23,32] In 2022, the Centre was merged with the very similar QUT's Centre for Future Enterprise, and Kowalkiewicz carries out its "Algorithmic Enterprise" research.^[33]

From 2017 to 2023, they served as a board member of the State Library of Queensland. They were also a founder and member of the board of advisors for the Queensland AI Hub from 2020 to 2023. Additionally, they have been a fellow at On Deck since 2020 and a member of the Queensland Government's Ministerial ICT Advisory Council since 2019.

Kowalkiewicz has delivered more than 100 keynotes to academia and industry.^[36] He primarily speaks on the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence and the challenges and opportunities it presents to organisations. Keynote topics include digital economy, digital transformation, economy of algorithms, innovation sprints, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, technology management, and business information systems.

In 2011, they won the SAP TechEd DemoJam in both Las Vegas and Bangalore. In 2024, they received the Good Design Award as a Gold Winner for Research Innovation Sprints.

In 2024, the book won the technology category of the Australian Business Book Awards. That same year, it was awarded a silver medal at the Independent Publisher Book Awards for its contribution to current events regarding social and humanitarian issues.

An audiobook was published in June 2024. A Chinese translation was published in September 2024.

In the United States, patents and patent applications include "Workflow task re-evaluation" (US 8429668 B2, issued June 11, 2009), "Workflow Modeling With Flexible Blocks" (US 20090281777 A1, issued November 12, 2009), and "Composing and executing service processes" (US 20100088701 A1, issued April 8, 2010). Additional United States patents and applications include "Method and system to effectuate recovery for dynamic workflows" (US 20110246991 A1, issued October 6, 2011), "Systems and Methods for Augmenting Physical Media from Multiple Locations" (US 20120324372 A1, issued December 20, 2012), and "Creating parallel control flows in business process models" (US 8365136 B2, issued January 29, 2013). Other United States patents include "Systems and methods for data aware workflow change management" (US 8413150 B2, issued April 2, 2013), "Timer patterns for process models" (US 8683436 B2, issued March 25, 2014), "Work flow model processing with weak dependencies that allows runtime insertion of additional tasks" (US 8719826 B2, issued May 6, 2014), and "Multi-media collaborator" (US 20140152665 A1, issued June 5, 2014).