The head of Sven Mahn IT GmbH & Co. says his team is applying AI first across requirements, testing, development, and sales, then carrying those lessons into customer work. He is also bringing a new requirements tool, Jerboa, to Dynamics Minds.
Sven Mahn did not arrive in the Microsoft business applications channel by a conventional route. In a PartnerTalks interview with Rick McCutcheon, the Hamburg-based consultant and company owner said he started as a concrete worker, moved into computer science and economics, and eventually built a Dynamics practice that now employs 36 people.
“So I started as a concrete worker 25 years ago and then transformed (into a) computer scientist and economic specialist,” Mahn said. “Set out on my own in 2005, and now, 21 years later, I have 36 employees, and we are running and doing implementation of Dynamics.”
Mahn said his entry into Dynamics began during a dual-study arrangement in Germany, where he was both studying and working inside a company that was moving from AS/400 to Microsoft Dynamics. He said he started working with the product in 2003, then went out on his own in 2005, with his former employer becoming his first customer.
Today, Mahn described his firm as a Microsoft-focused business centred on Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management, along with Power Platform and Dataverse work. The company also handles some CRM work, though Mahn said that area is broad enough that his team has chosen not to go too deep across the whole field. More recently, he said, the company decided to open up for AI development as well.
That AI move is not, at least yet, primarily a go-to-market story about packaged customer offers. Mahn told McCutcheon that his first objective is to use AI internally, within his own company’s delivery and commercial workflows, so the firm can work faster and with higher quality before trying to implement the same patterns for customers.
“It’s hard to say what kind of solutions we are building for our customers,” Mahn said. “It’s more that we are using AI in our own projects. So becoming faster and a frontier company to really get the products and the services faster in place and with a better quality.”
He framed that sequence as intentional. “That’s our first goal,” Mahn said. “I know that it’s also a goal to sell AI services or to put AI into the processes of the customers. But we thought it’s good to understand how we can leverage our own processes because then we can also implement it on the customer side.”
According to Mahn, internal AI use already spans requirements gathering, testing, development, and sales. In the sales process, he said, AI-generated mockups can help prospects see what a solution could look like before a project gets too far along.
“It’s really, really nice to get an idea of what the customer needs are and how to supply this as a mockup,” he said. Then he boiled the approach down to a simple line: “Show it, don’t tell it.”
That philosophy also sits behind Jerboa, a new tool Mahn said his team plans to present at DynamicsMinds in Slovenia in May. He described it as a way to speed up the early stages of software and Dynamics projects by converting fragmented inputs into structured requirements and delivery artifacts.
“We will present Jerboa,” Mahn said, calling it “a new tool I produced in the past half year.” He said the product can “capture the requirements by getting any document, any video, any fragment of requirements which is in the text base or as an audio.” From there, he said, the system converts that material “into requirements and kind of a quote in a very detailed way.” It can push the result into DevOps or Jira.
Mahn said Jerboa is useful not only for delivery but also for sales, where it can help a Partner form an early view of what a customer wants and structure those requirements consistently. He added that the tool is not limited to Finance and Supply Chain Management scenarios.
“It doesn’t matter what you want to build,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be a software project.”
The conference itself also matters to him. Mahn said he had heard a great deal about DynamicsMinds before deciding to attend and exhibit, and that colleagues who had already been there came back enthusiastic about both the community and the event. He said he wants to use the gathering to show what his company has achieved with AI in its own processes and to reconnect with the wider Dynamics network.
For Partners watching Microsoft’s “frontier” language take shape across the ecosystem, Mahn’s position is practical. Before AI becomes a polished offer sheet, he suggests, it may need to become an operating discipline within the firm. Jerboa, in that sense, looks less like a side project than a working example of the model he is describing.
