Nicole Büttner brought a funny video. You can see the cabaret artist Emmanuel Peterfalvi alias Alfons, who reports on the invention of fire in his orange tracksuit. Everyone thought it was good, everyone. Except for the Germans. The Germans asked where the emergency exit was and what the fire protection regulations actually looked like. The video shows a fact that really annoys Büttner, born in 1985, economist and successful AI entrepreneur, about Europe and especially Germany. At the Munich Economic Debates, organized by the Ifo Institute, she spoke about how AI could help companies survive in the competition.
But isn’t Europe, isn’t Germany already lagging behind when it comes to AI? The game, she says, is not over yet. But it has already started, and “many others are playing it more intensively.” Where does the opportunity actually lie for a country like Germany? What matters, says Büttner, is the field on which the game is played. When it comes to formulating an email using AI, it doesn’t matter that the suggestion is 100 percent accurate. In industrial production with very small tolerances, however, it does.
Her advice to companies: bring together the existing data and create an AI enhanced with specialist knowledge where Germany has its strengths, for example in medical technology, in pharmaceuticals, in production. But the data issue is not as simple as it seems at first glance. Because what is stored on company servers must first be made fit for AI. If that doesn’t happen, the old IT dictum applies: Garbage in, garbage out. A pretty thankless task: “Nobody sees the work on the database.”
“We have everything you need.”
Büttner believes that many companies cannot do this alone. Which is why she suggests throwing data from different companies into one pot and using it to create a basic industrial model. But companies often lack the insight that they could benefit from it. There are delicate approaches, such as Catena-X, in which companies from the automotive industry have joined forces. But politics is hardly helping.
Concerns – like in the Alfons video – often come first in Germany. The opportunity would be there: “We have everything you need,” says Büttner, “and we can start yesterday.” Data, she keeps coming back to, is not like oil that you burn or gold that lies in a safe. “The value of data lies in its recycling.” Büttner advocates getting started now: “What if we could do that?”
On the one hand, she appeals to politicians and companies to take a focused approach, with a plan that takes advantage of the special knowledge of the Germans hidden champions includes. You have to be quick. And above all – this is her second appeal – more money is urgently needed from investors so that start-ups can also receive financing for growth phases. “Companies have to become faster, otherwise they will be dinosaurs.”