The mix is critical: digitisation, process orchestration, cyber security OT / IT & domain specific LLMs by Christopher Brennan in Munich

Important and maybe mission critical technologies like digitisation, process orchestration & improvement, cyber-attacks and cyber security as well as domain specific large language models were frequently discussed topics at the recent DB AG Summer Investor workshop in Frankfurt. These topics were also frequently debated and discussed at the “My Way for Mittelstand” (medium sized companies) Event organised by The Pioneer in Berlin.

Both of these events are established communities in Central Europe and attract hundreds of participants from different verticals.

The discussions included the need for organisations (including public and state-owned organisations) to be more efficient and gain or maintain competitive advantage. Specifically German, French, Austrian and Swiss companies as well as Italian companies are seen to be the organisations to achieve most from these technologies. Organizations from these countries are also seen to be under significant cyber-attack.  

Why is this so? The participants discussed that the overall heading (Überbegriff in German) is digitisation (private and state-owned organisations, large enterprise and medium sized companies (Mittelstand). This has CEO, not just CIO focus. Part of the way to achieve this is relooking at existing processes to explore way to automate complex workflows. Going a step further, these workflows can be in several departments who traditionally have not communicated with each other.  This lack of communication is a disadvantage most of the delegates stated. Here lies the potential to introduces process orchestration platforms to improve efficiency, to scale and to cut across silos. In this way, the delegates felt that they could better monitor services, the business at large and analyse data. While there were many areas for digitisation and clearly different sectors have potentially some different focus areas in their digitisation, nearly all the delegates agreed on these areas for focus (i.e. across all verticals such as pharma, finance, energy, transportation, manufacturing) :

1)       Supply chain management

2)       Customer experience. Some delegates called this customer onboarding.

3)       Reporting & visibility, both financial and compliance, governance (e.g. NIST2, AI Act as well as normal tax, shareholder and management reporting)

4)       People in terms of a better employee experience especially for people development

5)       Efficiency of some operations

6)       Finding, analysing and using data (data about internal operations or about customers or other)

These platforms are very helpful and probably critical for some organisations it was stated. However, the attack surface increases in size as result of more software being implemented. As a result, the number and seriousness of cyber-attacks increases. Delegates felt that the sophistication of these attacks is becoming a major issue for them.  Some of the participants explained about the lack of in-house teams to address these challenges in their own organisations.  Even large organisations have their challenges in this regard. Amongst the cyber security challenges that the delegates face daily are:

-            Vulnerability assessments and audits,

-            Data protection, especially given the increase in states sponsored cyber crime,

-            The merging of IT and OT domains. These areas have traditionally been separated (in manufacturing sector) but now face intense “cyber aggression” where the aggressors exploit the relative “unreadiness” of the OT teams,

-            Application security and clean code.

The discussions explored ways in which process orchestration could inadvertently / accidently create more risk or even damage for organisations (private and public sectors). 

Many of the LLM (large language models) used in smart algorithms are quite general at the moment, there is a significant potential for domain specific LLMs which build on the specific domain knowledge of European organisations. Put in another way, the expression “Europe’s hidden champions” i.e. organisations who are leaders in a specific sector, sometimes niche worldwide have collected so much know- how over the decades in some cases even more than a century) of their existence. This documented know-how, knowledge could be used for training small, more focused LLMs. LLMs have basically three ways to be trained (Oxford University AI Programme). These are:

1)       Supervised learning

2)       Unsupervised learning

3)       Reinforcement learning

The delegates discussed ways of developing smaller LLMs in Europe (specifically in Germany, France and Italy) to help boost their digitisation strategies. Using LLMs as part of the digitisation strategy can accelerate analysis and therefore potentially faster decision making.  However, as with process orchestration, there are potentially cyber security issues. LLMs, whatever their size or provenance, are all software! It is critical that data integrity is maintained, i.e. no manipulating or abuse of date that is use din the LLM is possible. Thus, model security becomes a focus. So does data privacy especially in EU countries.

In conclusion, these two excellent events DB AG Summer Investor workshop in Frankfurt and  the “My Way for Mittelstand” (medium sized companies) Event organised by The Pioneer in Berlin explored the real-life  situations, potential and challenges that many companies in the EU have related to digitisation, process orchestration, cyber security and LLM usage.  They need advice and expertise partnerships.

The Deutsche Beteiligung AG (DB AG) Investor Community Workshop & The „My Way Pioneer“ (Mittelstand & Medium sized companies) Event  in September 2024