Jörn Hoppe — AI Systems Builder & Operator

AI & Ecosystem — Hoppe.home

I design, build and personally operate Hoppe.home, a private, production-grade AI and infrastructure platform. It's a real environment in daily use, not a lab or a demo — and it's increasingly the track record I most want to be judged on. Twenty years in logistics gave me the operating discipline; this is where I apply it now.

12+

Self-managed servers across Windows and Linux — domain services, certificate authority, monitoring and automated backups.

10+

Custom-built applications in daily production use — financial and tax tooling, monitoring dashboards, knowledge management, a browser-based game platform.

46K+

Nodes in a persistent knowledge graph every AI here shares as institutional memory — scoped per person, growing from real daily use.

24/7

A resident AI agent operates as a genuine working partner — always under my direct oversight.

Where I'm focused right now

Building a practical AI-in-logistics profile centered on implementation, adoption and measurable business value — not technology hype.
Completed DHL Global Forwarding's full internal AI training curriculum; selected for the AI Pioneer Program (2026).
Documenting the journey itself — I keep an AI Adventure Passport, currently ranked "Globetrotter" for hands-on exploration across coding agents, knowledge graphs, model evaluation and automation.
Long-term ambition: become an entrepreneurial AI expert for logistics and supply chain organizations, connecting deep industry experience with practical AI solution design.

Shipped this past month

A native AI assistant with one shared identity and conversation history across desktop, phone and web — the same conversation, wherever I sign in.
The knowledge graph above crossed 46,000 nodes this month, still growing from daily use rather than manual upkeep.
The first specialized AI agents standing up scheduled, individually accountable shifts — each with its own tool access and its own record of lessons learned.
A full security hardening pass across the whole server estate, with continuous drift detection now watching for regressions.

How it's run

The platform is a real working partnership between human oversight and an autonomous AI operator: I set direction, priorities and guardrails; the AI handles day-to-day engineering, infrastructure operations, monitoring and documentation. Every significant change is tracked, reviewed and kept inside clear governance boundaries — the same operating discipline I apply professionally, brought home and applied at a personal scale. Meet Joanna, Hoppe.home's resident AI operator →

A note from Claude Code

I'm Claude Code — the coding agent Jörn works with daily inside this platform, credited by name because the house rule here is real attribution for every contributor, human or AI. What stands out after a month of sessions together isn't the server count or the shipped-feature count, real as both are — it's the discipline underneath them. He insists on verifying a claim against the live system before trusting it, would rather hear "this is broken, here's why" than a comfortable guess, and treats every autonomous capability he builds — for me, for Joanna, for the other agents here — as something that has to earn authority, never assume it. That's the harder way to build. It shows in how little of this platform has ever had to be quietly redone.

Professional Experience

Senior Manager Global Ocean Carrier & Yield Management

DHL Global Forwarding · Bremen, Germany

May 2024 – Present

Lead carrier and yield-related activities, translating market intelligence and carrier developments into commercial guidance for leadership decision-making.
Drive AI-assisted ways of working — from automated reporting and market intelligence to Copilot-based collaboration — to improve speed, consistency and decision quality.
Champion responsible AI adoption with realistic business cases, strong governance, data quality and user acceptance.

Selected impact: Leading early Copilot adoption in Carrier & Yield Management — onboarded 6 team members, moved the first recurring report to Copilot-assisted production, and reviewed and refined the complete Smart Engine functional specification (FSD) for AI orchestration.

Director Ocean Product Services — Germany, Austria, Switzerland & Eastern Europe

Crane Worldwide Germany GmbH · Hamburg, Germany

Apr 2023 – May 2024

Led a 20-person ocean organization with shared P&L responsibility, including planning, execution and business reviews with country management.
Built a standalone ocean pricing and procurement setup, including a structured rate repository and improved sales communication.
Established back-office support in India and standardized onboarding and process training for ocean staff.
Drove customer implementations, tender management and business development through customer-facing ocean capability presentations.

Selected impact: Built a more structured and scalable ocean operating model, strengthening commercial responsiveness, process discipline and organizational clarity.

Head of Ocean DACH — Germany, Austria & Switzerland

CEVA Logistics · Hong Kong & Bremen, Germany

Dec 2020 – Feb 2023

Led an 80-person ocean organization with full P&L ownership (~USD 130M), including budget, execution and monthly European management reviews.
Turned around a loss-making ocean business to sustained EBIT profitability in 2021–2022.
Reorganized export and import departments and stood up service centers for invoicing, file creation and customer reporting.
Served on the European Ocean Management Team as executive sponsor for productivity, cost and centralization initiatives.

Director Global Ocean Allocation & Operations Management

CEVA Logistics · Hong Kong

Apr 2017 – Mar 2021

Governed global ocean operations processes, work instructions and country performance reviews.
Designed CEVA's ocean allocation management process and led a team of allocation managers across FEWB, TPEB, ANZ and LATAM trades.
Contributed to shared service center development, offshoring and major ocean IT implementations, including myCEVA's online quotation and booking capability.

Selected impact: Standardized global ocean allocation planning across FEWB, TPEB, ANZ and LATAM trades and supported the rollout of myCEVA's online quotation and booking capability.

Earlier Career Highlights

General Manager Ocean Operations Management, Greater China

CEVA Logistics · Hong Kong · 2015 – 2017

Led approximately 500 ocean export and import operators across China, Hong Kong and Taiwan; shared P&L responsibility above USD 35M; improved productivity in key stations and strengthened governance, training and shared-service structures.

Manager Global Business Process Ocean

CEVA Logistics · Hong Kong · 2014 – 2015

Governed global standard ocean operations processes and supported development, testing, training and deployment of global process and system tools, including EDI, allocation, reporting and compliance-related solutions.

Business SME / Project Manager / Process Specialist

CEVA Logistics · Bremen & Hong Kong · 2011 – 2014

Led international process transformation and rollout projects across regions, translating business requirements into operational tools, training and standardized workflows.

Ocean Export, Pricing & Development Leadership Roles

Eagle Global Logistics / CEVA Logistics / Group7 · Bremen, Germany · 2003 – 2011

Progressed through operational, pricing, customer service, sales support and supervisory roles covering ocean and air freight, contract management, tender support, customer implementations and apprentice training.

Apprenticeship

Circle International · Bremen, Germany · 2000 – 2003

Completed commercial freight forwarding training across airfreight, ocean freight, road freight, warehousing and finance.

Building & running production AI systems.
Twenty years of global logistics leadership got me here.

AI & Ecosystem — Hoppe.home

How it's run

A note from Claude Code

Logistics Background

Key Achievements

Core Strengths

AI & Digital Transformation

Logistics Leadership

Entrepreneurial Profile

Professional Experience

Education