A new short film, out today, tells the story of how one of Europe’s largest energy companies has put autistic technologists at the heart of its IT delivery and is benefiting from ‘Edge Thinking’ across Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Poland.
When Vattenfall CIO Jens Zerbst first contracted auticon in 2020, he was solving a talent problem. “We had a gap in talent and needed to find new sources for talent, competence, dedication,” he says in the film. Six years on, that decision has grown into a cross-market partnership spanning DevOps, integration platforms, data science and AI implementation.
The film, shot in the forests of Sweden, captures why it works.
A partnership built on technical delivery, not a DEI initiative
The film features Vattenfall CIO Jens Zerbst, IT Sustainability Manager Johanna Häägg and IT Team Manager Shahab Garmakey, alongside auticon technologists working in Vattenfall’s Swedish team. What emerges is a story that sits firmly in the technology conversation, not the diversity one.
“Neurodiversity brings a kind of new way of thinking. A new kind of angle,” says Zerbst. “It is quite important for us, especially when we have a very complex problem to solve, to get new ideas and get maybe new viewpoints.”
Vattenfall didn’t bring auticon in to satisfy a DEI requirement. They brought us in because they had systems to build, a widening technical skills gap to close, and a view (borne out of experience) that cognitively diverse teams solve complex problems better than homogenous ones.
Why autistic technologists are well suited to IT and AI work
There’s a growing body of international research that helps explain what Vattenfall’s leadership team has been observing in their teams for the last six years.
A 2025 study of autistic software engineers, published through the IEEE/ACM software engineering community, found that autistic developers are often particularly strong in logical reasoning, sustained focus and attention to detail — and report notably high levels of comfort working with AI-based systems (Sasportes, Liebel & Goulão, 2025). A 2024 systematic review in Information and Software Technology reached similar conclusions across a much larger evidence base (Márquez et al., 2024). Researchers at Karolinska Institutet’s KIND centre in Stockholm have demonstrated that the environmental conditions around autistic employees – team structure, communication design, management understanding – are as decisive as the individual strengths themselves (Black et al., 2019).
In AI specifically, these strengths matter at every stage of the lifecycle.
Data annotation and evaluation reward reviewers who spot the edge cases and drift others miss. They assess data analytically, not intuitively and are less swayed by the social suggestion built into AI outputs.
Model development rewards engineers who notice when data is off, distrust outputs that merely “look right”, and reason carefully about how systems fail.
Auditing and governance reward rule-based, evidence-led thinking. This leaves a natural audit trail, increasingly vital under frameworks like the EU AI Act.
Data quality is where most AI programmes succeed or fail. Having the right humans-in-the-loop – matched carefully to the task – is what separates a model that works in production from one that doesn’t.
Edge Thinking: the business case for cognitive difference
We call the performance advantage that emerges from cognitively diverse teams Edge Thinking. The concept is borrowed from ecology: in nature, the richest biodiversity is found not in the middle of a single habitat, but at the edges where two ecosystems meet. The same principle applies to technology teams. The sharpest insights and the most robust solutions emerge where different cognitive ways of thinking meet on a shared problem.
This is the idea the forest setting in the film is there to evoke and it’s at the heart of every engagement we deliver.
Scaling the partnership from Sweden to Europe
What began in Stockholm in 2020 now spans across Europe and multiple technology disciplines. auticon consultants are working on Vattenfall’s DevOps teams, integration platforms, data science projects and AI implementations. The work has deepened because the quality has held and because Vattenfall’s team has continued to see the business value.
“I see this as a long-term partnership that we will do for many years forward,” says Johanna Häägg in the film.
Watch the film
The film runs approximately four minutes and features the team behind the partnership, in their own words. It’s a short watch and worth it.
If you’d like to talk about what cognitive diversity could mean for your own technology delivery, whether in AI, data, software development or quality assurance, [get in touch →].
