Thank you for your question. I'd like to answer to them individually.

1. What can European Commission (or Member States) do to enable uptake and acceleration of AI in European business? What are the priorities?

As I’m working on Finnish DIH, following is my experience:

For a normal company , AI experts are needed for recognising the needs, enabling environment for an AI and bringing up the system. Then there’s a bit of learning curve for the leaders and staff of the company. For this need DIH’s are suitable and EU Commission has already established them.  Naturally DIH cannot bring up all the companies, but for this we have a network of companies that we can pair with the customer. Job gets done and DIH just run the project thru it’s cycle.

How to enable uptake and accelerate business with the AI?  We really need the European standardization of an AI. Currently only big AI houses ( in the US ) are safe bet for a company CEO. Any other choice, and you may have your board of owners coming to you. AI according EU standard would be another safe bet for CEO, and much better for entire Europe. Standardization would give us also modular AI, where manufacturers could make only those parts that they’re best at. That would bring the cost of an AI down and user could afford to pick up those modules they need and what they know are best suited for them. That offcourse would need a standard between modules for communication. Eu would like AI to be safe for humans and function within laws – there standard modules for law, feedback and control are needed. For example GDPR is one of the laws that every AI should be able to obey – now it’s just not the time for it yet and that is one big obstackle for a company to adopt AI technology. Money just cannot buy everything and we need to mature AI marked in Europe with a standard.

For a priority, EU could make it easier for DIH’s to finance their job. At the moment funding goes thru governmental evaluation with political views and that doesn’t always promote help for small or middle sized companies nor co-operation with the cross-border DIH’s. Is direct funding impossible with importance and achievement evaluation?

1. What are the key components of enabling AI ecosystems? Can you give examples from industries, particularly, automotive, health, industrial machinery and finance?

The ecosystem grows when there’s a mutual benefit with the DIH and Company that is involved.  DIH is non profit company, publicly owned and specialists trusted by default. Company can get free research for their needs and a new partner that can help them in that job. DIH can oversee that process and make sure that company get their need fulfilled and providing company gets adequate compensation. When DIH has education ( like an university etc) to offer there will be more persons that can their way around AI in the companies and society in general.

As we have very vibrant technology cluster in our area, where most of the ecosystem companies and new start up’s are growing, we have’nt forgotten our healthcare either.  Common companies get their production automated and robotization is spreading in very good rate, but also healthcare has had it’s own AI innovations and robots for the special need individuals.

One of the most interesting innovation has been our “Living Lab”, that is situated in some ecosystem company where they have opened their facility and data for experiments to another companies.  With these labs you can come and test your ideas and find the best ways to  adopt automation, robotics and AI in your company.  Usually these companies also find some common ground and start co-operation in that process. It is really a win-win situation and our DIH is overseeing it.

1. Are unicorns and tech companies important, and in what way?

Companies that strike it thru are needed and they start to build an ecosystem of their own around them. That is all beneficial and good for the local economy.  However, public funding seem to seek also these companies and when it does , smaller companies are “forgotten” behind.  For a politician it is beneficial to direct money for a big company instead of smaller one. We rather would see much more diverse funding than today.

I hope You find these answers any help to Your task.

wbr. Kai Salmela , AI Specialist , Prizztech Ltd, RoboCoast R&D 

I want to refer to the first qustion.

1. What can European Commission (or Member States) do to enable uptake and acceleration of AI in European business? What are the priorities?

SMBs (Small Medium Businesses) adopt AI technologies very slow because the result of such a project is not guaranteed. In this case, the managers of the SMBs do not run to finance such projects, and therefore it is difficult to harness them to this issue. Our company (Maxsoft) has received public funding for an attempt to predict outputs in avocado. We have received permission from one of the customers (Avocado packing house) to use data sets of output in the past 20 years. Right now, we are dealing with the subject. But even though the funding still exists, the challenge is to explain the customer the benefits of such research.

If we would be able to disseminate the benefits of such research to these SMBs, they will look for solutions in this area.

Has the Business Impact subgroup of AI HLEG done any research into whether so-called 'AI' computer systems increase productivity, profits and GDP, or it just another 'assumption' that it does? We must not forget that over the last 25 years there has been no approachable greater increase in these three economic measures. Globally there has been an above average increase, but these have been due to political and economic change and cannot be attributed to increased technological changes. Indeed, given the 2000 dot com recession and the 2008 deep recession we are still in, which were for the most part casued by over hyped and misused IT, the usual increase in these measures due to technological improvements since 1800 would if anything appear to have decreased since the 1990s.

Without any evidence that ‘AI’ technology is or will benefit European business and citizens, it is surely irresponsible to bring pressure upon or incentivise businesses to adopt ‘AI’ technology. For sure, business should be encouraged to make informed decisions about new technologies, especially when much of it is untried and is for the most part still at the R&D stage. This appears to be just another example of ‘AI hype’ and does not demonstrate much human intelligence.