Katharina is a work and organisational psychologist with deep expertise in mental health, burnout prevention, and stress resilience. As co-developer of naia at RELIEF AI, she is responsible for the scientific quality and knowledge base behind the AI-powered avatar, ensuring every interaction is grounded in evidence-based psychology. Her work sits at the intersection of clinical insight and digital innovation, bringing human depth to AI-driven wellbeing solutions.
We are delighted to be partnering with RELIEF AI in Zurich where Katharina is also joining us as a speaker. We caught up with her to see how she’s feeling in the run up to the summit:
Hi Katharina we are thrilled that you are joining us at the Wellbeing at Work Summit in Zurich this week. Our first and most important question is, how are you doing today?
Honestly? Energised. I’m at a point in my work where everything is converging: the science, the technology, and the urgency. We’ve been building naia for almost 2 years, and to see it now being implemented in real organisations, with real employees struggling with real burnout, that gives me a kind of drive that coffee can’t replicate. I’m doing well and I’m ready for this conversation.
As a leader based in the region, what are the main challenges you are facing when it comes to employee wellbeing and mental health?
Three things stand out. First, the gap between awareness and action, most organisations now know mental health matters, but their interventions are still reactive, episodic, and often stigmatising. Second, scale: traditional psychological support simply cannot reach everyone who needs it. We don’t have enough trained professionals, and access is deeply unequal. Third and this is underestimated: the erosion of psychological basic needs at work. Drawing on Grawe’s motivational schema theory, when employees lose a sense of control, orientation, belonging, or self-worth in their work environment, burnout isn’t a surprise. It’s a predictable outcome. We need to address these structural need frustrations, not just teach people how to breathe.
What strategies have you seen developing over the past 6 months, both internally and externally, that are moving the dial on wellbeing in the workplace?
Two developments genuinely excite me. The first is the shift from one-size-fits-all wellbeing programmes to personalised, data-driven support: tools that can identify where an individual’s psychological needs are unmet, and respond accordingly. That’s exactly what we’re doing with naia. The second is the growing integration of wellbeing into leadership development. Organisations that are seeing results aren’t treating mental health as an HR add-on. They’re building psychologically safe cultures from the top down, and holding leaders accountable for them. These two directions reinforce each other.
Why is employee wellbeing so important to you personally?
I’ve spent most parts of my career studying why people break down under pressure and how they don’t have to. As a work and organisational psychologist, I’ve seen the full spectrum: people who thrive, and people who quietly disappear into burnout while their organisation looks the other way. What drives me is the injustice of that. Burnout is largely preventable. The knowledge exists. The tools are getting better. What’s missing is the will to use them proactively, before people reach the edge. That’s why I moved from academia and consulting into building naia. I wanted to work at the intersection of psychological science and scalable technology, because that’s where real prevention becomes possible.
What impact is AI having in your organization and how are you managing that?
AI is our organisation, in a sense, but not in the way that creates fear in employees. naia is a Digital Human, an AI-powered Mental Mind Mentor specifically designed for stress and burnout prevention in the workplace. What we’ve learned is that how you design AI mental health tools matters enormously. The psychological mechanisms of action, the therapeutic alliance, the ethical boundaries, these cannot be afterthoughts. We’re currently running a rigorous research programme, including RCT-design studies, to demonstrate effectiveness. We take the question “does this actually help?” very seriously, because in mental health, the bar must be high.
Other than AI, are there any challenges that you are seeing for the first time and how are you addressing them?
Yes! The emerging challenge is loneliness at work. Workplace loneliness is rising sharply even in organisations with hybrid culture initiatives. Connection isn’t just about being in the same room. It requires psychological safety, shared meaning, and genuine belonging. We need much more sophisticated thinking about this.
What areas do you think employers should be focused on over the next 12 months?
Three priorities I’d advocate strongly for:
Prevention over intervention. Stop waiting for crisis. Use early-warning indicators_ psychological, behavioural, organisational, to intervene before burnout sets in.
AI literacy as a wellbeing strategy. Employees who understand AI, who feel competent navigating it, experience significantly less threat anxiety. Building AI competence isn’t just a business imperative – it’s a mental health one.
Measuring what matters. Far too many organisations still measure wellbeing by EAP call volumes or absence rates. We need validated psychometric instruments that capture basic need satisfaction, stress load, and resilience factors and we need leadership to take those numbers as seriously as financial KPIs.
Do you feel that investment in employee wellbeing in the region is increasing or decreasing and is that a direct reflection on HR leaders’ increasing ability to demonstrate effective returns of their strategies to leadership?
I see a bifurcation. Some organisations are genuinely increasing investment, especially where HR leadership has become more sophisticated in connecting wellbeing data to business outcomes — retention, performance, sick leave costs. The EU’s focus on psychosocial risk under the upcoming legal frameworks is also creating real urgency.
But in other organisations — particularly mid-market companies without dedicated HR analytics capacity — investment is being cut as a “nice to have.” The tragedy is that these are often the organisations with the highest burnout risk and the least visibility into it.
The return-on-investment case for prevention is not hard to make. The barrier is rarely the evidence — it’s translating that evidence into the language of leadership. That’s a capability HR urgently needs to build.
How has your organisation been leading the way?
naia represents something I believe is genuinely novel: an AI Mental Mind Mentor built on a rigorous psychological foundation — not a chatbot with a wellness label attached. We’ve developed the system around Grawe’s basic psychological needs, cognitive and emotional driver models from behavioural therapy, and a Socratic questioning architecture that guides users toward self-awareness rather than prescribing answers.
We’re in active enterprise pilots, competing in a market with well-funded competitors, and we’re the ones bringing the deepest psychological science to the product. We’re also building the evidence base as we go — my doctoral research is directly tied to demonstrating naia’s effectiveness in burnout prevention contexts.
As a woman working at the intersection of psychology, AI, and mental health, I also feel a responsibility to make this space more visible — to show that the future of workplace wellbeing isn’t just about technology, it’s about putting the right psychological expertise at the centre of how that technology is built.
Katharina will be speaking in Zurich as part of our Wellbeing at Work Summit Europe 2026 which takes place in Zurich, Amsterdam and Madrid this month. Click the links below to find out more and book your tickets:
