Artificial intelligence (AI) will be key to the future of German industry, Economy Minister Katherina Reiche said during a visit to the Hannover Messe business fair on Tuesday.
Reiche described AI as an opportunity for Germany to survive as a location for industrial production, offering the option for Germany to take its place on the global stage of AI giants as an industrial country.
“We belong there,” Reiche said, expressing confidence that German companies could achieve this. But she said a precondition was that better use was made of the available data.
Germany had great industrial manufacturing depth and was “sitting on a huge store of data” that the United States envied, Reiche said.
The minister expressed criticism of EU regulation, saying that the EU’s AI regulation treated the issue as being about “toy chatbots” whereas it was about industrial competitiveness.
Reiche called for the rules to be adapted so that industrial data could be used by AI, otherwise companies would not be able to use their data to train applications.
Reiche cautioned against overstrict rules, saying it was unacceptable that automotive companies had to go to the US when training autonomous vehicles because they were not allowed to use data in Europe to a sufficient extent.
She called for greater political urgency, with quicker and bolder decision-taking without always having to follow the regulations strictly.
