Europe's big chance - It's time to experiment with new technologies

It is 1995. The internet for the public at large is in its infancy and everyone is wondering what kind of future the new technology will bring. In a Newsweek article, the famous American astronomer Clifford Stoll has said: "Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms (…) Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."

More than 20 years later, that assertion highlights an amazing paradox: we may be able to predict fairly precisely what changes a technology will make possible in the future (Stoll’s “visionaries” were right), but that does not make it credible that those innovations will really change our life or our work – in a nutshell, that they will become the norm.

I believe we are in a very similar situation today with artificial intelligence (AI). Everyone is talking about it, the changes it could usher in are described in detail in hundreds of expert blogs, and yet it all remains rather abstract. Most company managers do not know how to incorporate the issue into their short- or medium-term strategy. Public authorities do not know how to bring up the subject, either with the business community or with society as a whole.

Governments and entrepreneurs must join forces

And yet technological change does not surprise everyone to the same extent. Some prepare for it better than others. That is equally true for businesses and countries alike. In the case of the internet, American and Chinese companies clearly caught the wave, giving rise to the now-famous GAFA and BAT and setting the pace for the rest of the world. But their success owed a great deal to national strategies. The American and Chinese governments invested massively in the internet from the outset, stimulating research and influencing entrepreneurs. Siri, Apple’s voice recognition system, originated in the CALO project funded by DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm. In the end, it does not really matter that Clifford Stoll failed at first to identify the internet’s potential for disruption. Governments and entrepreneurs nurtured the technology, in cooperation with the scientific community, until it turned into the tidal wave we are all familiar with.

In comparison, Europe generally speaking has missed out on the opportunity afforded by the internet, even though we had the necessary technological and financial resources to make the most of it. There are many reasons for that, widely studied and well-known. But there is one in particular that I have been able to see up close in the course of my consulting activities for European firms: Europe’s economic and industrial fabric is poorly equipped to seize non-mature technologies as an opportunity.

Europe – and this is its great strength – has a dense web of businesses which consolidate and transmit their expertise over the long term. Breakthrough innovation involves taking a gamble on a technology still rather remote from a company’s core business, and there is nothing at all self-evident about it. Our companies, close to their traditional customers and attentive to their margins, are reluctant to invest in technologies whose contribution to their future growth is an unknown quantity. How can they take a risk on AI now when no-one yet knows what products and services it could generate or how it could transform their business?

Europe must learn to venture into unknown territory

Europe is not the United States or China so it needs to find its own road to success. For me, it is not a matter of spending astronomical amounts of money like Google or Amazon but rather of pointing our European economic fabric in the right direction, stimulating investment and creating the conditions in which researchers, entrepreneurs and businesses can come together. That is how technologies mature, and ultimately offer genuine opportunities not only for the next ground-breakers (AI startups) but also for traditional players. Europe has produced some amazing people working in AI, like the Frenchmen Yann LeCun, who heads up AI activities at Facebook, and Antoine Blondeaux, founder of Sentient Technologies, the AI startup that has raised more money than any other - $143 million. They should be better known, in political and institutional circles and among business leaders. Another example is the German company Arago, which offers AI solutions to industrial firms, and its founder Chris Boos.

It is by creating a network with people like this, ensuring that their ideas circulate in the business community, and backing technologies whose business cases are not yet visible, that Europe will forge tomorrow’s champions.

France and Germany must give fresh impetus

While still a candidate in the French presidential election, Emmanuel Macron emphasised on several occasions the need to give fresh impetus to investment in Europe. In an election year in Germany as well, thought is being given to the question of how to support technological innovation, including in AI.

The FranceIA initiative launched by the previous government in France seems to me a step in the right direction. However, it will not really bear fruit until it has achieved European scope and attracted the support of major firms and investors in both France and Germany. We need to make it a top priority for Europe over the coming decades, drawing on Europe’s strengths in economic and industrial development, such as coordinated macroeconomic policy, technological cooperation, the training of engineers and our industrial fabric (Mittelstand and mid-caps). Political and business leaders, entrepreneurs, heads of institutions and consultants alike, we should all give this idea our support, right now. After all, the world is turning ever faster and technological progress does not heed electoral timetables.