How the ‘Year of AI’ can make Europe a digital leader [Promoted content]

2023 will be remembered as a pivotal ‘year of AI,’ marked by significantly increased engagement with AI across the spectrum – from groundbreaking start-ups to global enterprises. 

Sasha Rubel, Head of AI and Machine Learning, Public Policy EMEA, AWS.

This wave of technological exploration couldn’t be more important to Europe’s future, as the European Commission has identified the need to rapidly accelerate digitalisation. The Commission’s ambitious Digital Decade policy programme aims to make Europe a digital leader by 2030. 

A Public First study in 2022, commissioned by AWS, estimated that reaching the Commission’s targets of 75% of European businesses using cloud, big data, and AI by 2030 could unlock €2.8 trillion for Europe’s economy. 

The question now is how can Europe harness 2023, the ‘year of AI’, to have a lasting effect in its ‘Digital Decade’?

AWS has partnered with independent policy and research consultants, Strand Partners, to study the impacts of the AI boom, and will shortly launch a study into Europe’s digitalisation. It will outline its incredible potential to boost productivity, create differentiated experiences, and innovate faster, as well as address some of our greatest societal challenges. Early insights show that 70% of businesses using AI say it has streamlined their business processes, 75% say it has increased revenues, and 75% say it has stimulated innovation.

We are already seeing European champions using AI to positively impact society.

Growy, a Netherlands-based start-up, operates vertical farms, tended by robots. The company uses AI applications to monitor vast amounts of data on plant health, optimising their growth. Growy offers a glimpse into an innovative and sustainable model of farming, making food insecurity a thing of the past.

TWAICE is a German company working towards an emissions-free future, providing predictive analytics to help electric vehicle makers and renewable energy firms to optimise their use of battery technology. The company has used AI in order to improve data analytics, significantly improving customers’ battery life and realising cost savings.

Other companies are working with AWS to widen access to AI technologies. Founded by French entrepreneurs, Hugging Face is on a mission to ‘democratise good machine learning.’ It is a leading open-source platform for AI builders, providing tools to empower the European AI community. As part of AWS’s global network of more than 100,000 partners, it offers customers easy access to over 400,000 pre-trained AI models. 

Cloud is making AI smarter

What do these AI success stories have in common? The successful adoption of cloud technologies. The 2023 Network Readiness Index report, published by Portulans Institute and Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, emphasises cloud adoption as critical for digital readiness and success. 

Cloud technologies are important to generative AI, underpinning the Large Language Models (LLMs) which power its programmes and provide storage capacity.

AWS is committed to democratising access to generative AI. We are thrilled to offer our customers the choice to use a diverse high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Stability AI, and Amazon, to build their generative AI applications.

Overcoming Europe’s challenges

Capitalising on this ‘year of AI’ will require private-public digital cooperation, especially in these three key areas: 

• Raising awareness and educating businesses: It is essential to improve understanding and trust in AI. AWS is committed to promoting the safe and responsible development of AI, and is endorsing  the White House Voluntary AI commitments. We look forward to discussing the AI Pact with the European Commission and industry in more detail. We have announced a range of new tools to enable responsible AI innovation.
• Closing digital skills gaps: Action is needed to increase digital skills through training programmes and dedicated funding, so businesses have strong foundations before embarking on more complex adoption programmes. In our upcoming report, 44% of European businesses reported that a difficulty in sourcing new employees with requisite skills was holding them back from using digital technologies. AWS is committed to providing 29 million people with free cloud computing skills training by 2025 and recently launched our “AI Ready” commitment, pledging to provide free AI skills training to two million people globally by 2025.
• Addressing legal and regulatory uncertainties: Businesses and citizens desire a supportive and risk-based regulatory environment, encouraging international investments, digital cooperation, interoperability, and innovation around technologies such as AI and the cloud. Our upcoming report found that businesses which identify compliance and legal uncertainties as a barrier to digital adoption plan to invest 48% less in technologies over a three-year horizon, compared to businesses who don’t face such barriers. 

AWS supports governments’ efforts to put in place effective risk-based regulatory frameworks and guardrails for AI that protect civil rights, while also allowing for continued innovation and practical application. The EU has just reached a provisional agreement on the AI Act – a broad legal framework for regulating the use of artificial intelligence. As one of the world’s leading developers and deployers of AI tools and services, trust in our products is one of our core tenets and we welcome the overarching goal of the regulation. We encourage policymakers to continue pursuing an innovation-friendly and internationally coordinated approach, and we are committed to collaborating with the EU and industry to support the safe, secure, and responsible development of AI technology. Because every country is grappling with many of the same policy challenges, it is vital that we try to align around interoperable policy solutions, based on international standards, to the greatest extent possible as the technical requirements of the AI Act are agreed. 

AWS is a proud partner in Europe’s digital future, focused on offering the best-in-class tools and services for the responsible development and deployment of AI services, and also continuing our engagement with lawmakers to promote strong consumer protections while encouraging the fast pace of innovation.  

We need to make it possible for all organisations, regardless of size or sector, to innovate with AI. Following this decisive ‘year of AI,’ policymakers, industry, academia, and civil society have to collaborate to identify risks, build safeguards, and make sure AI is used for good.  Responsibility drives trust.  Trust drives adoption.  And adoption drives innovation.