With local offices and key customers and partners in the country, Germany is an important European market for Unikie. Unikie has a long-term commitment to building relationships between Germany and Finland and fostering new business opportunities – both for Unikie and other companies and partners in the two countries.
A practical enabler for this work is the cooperation between Unikie and the German-Finnish Chamber of Commerce. This spring, Unikie once again participated in the Chamber’s spring event, this time focusing on Generative Artificial Intelligence.
This year’s event attracted a full house of people – more than 100 participants from both Germany and Finland, representing businesses and organizations from various fields. The opening talk was delivered by Wille Rydman, the Minister of Economic Affairs for Finland.
Unikie’s commitment to Generative AI
The day’s agenda was all about Generative AI and how it inevitably affects businesses of all sizes and organizations operating in all domains. Unikie’s Markus Jakobsson’s presentation was titled Gen AI – What’s hype and what’s real, focusing on how AI is used specifically at a software development company.
For Unikie, AI has gone beyond just hype and a promise of a better tomorrow – AI has already become an everyday tool that designers and developers use in their everyday work. From prototyping to code generation and testing, generative AI helps improve the efficiency of Unikie’s experts and international teams.
For Unikie’s customers, this means that they get more value from Unikie’s core services, today and tomorrow.
In his presentation, Markus raised one often forgotten aspect of using cloud-based AI solutions: high energy consumption. As an analogy, if human thinking would be like a single LED flickering and a Google search would be like turning on a light bulb briefly, a generative AI query would be like running a high-powered computer for a few seconds. Multiplied by millions of interactions, this amounts to a lot of needed energy.
As one way to mitigate this challenge, Unikie utilizes so-called Edge AI computing, where AI processing is done as close to the source as possible – for example, sensor data from a car is processed inside the vehicle, without sending everything to the cloud. This results in a more environmentally-friendly approach and better resource utilization.
AI productivity leap requires changes to how we work
In his opening talk, Minister of Economic Affairs Wille Rydman emphasized that AI is a very potential candidate for enabling the next major leap in productivity deeply required in our current society. The minister painted a clear picture that the government is behind AI wherever it helps boosting business.
One of the event discussions revolved around how generative AI changes how we lead work and how companies’ processes have to change.
First, to get the most out of AI, companies have to invest in high-quality data. Data-driven companies have better possibilities to innovating with AI and generating more value.
Second, if AI can significantly speed up one phase of a company’s process – from weeks or months to mere days – the rest of the process and the organization must accommodate for this new cycle, otherwise the potential benefit can be lost. To enable this, companies must be able to make major changes to their operations and ensure that their staff have the skills and know-how to working with AI.
Yet another theme discussed at the event was the ethical use of AI. What kinds of tasks can be given to AI? Where does the data come from and how is it used? What kind of control and transparency is needed? Organizations should also set up ethical committees to tackle these questions. Ultimately, responsibility cannot be outsourced to AI.
Cooperation is the way forward
Going forward, Unikie will continue to maintain and build the relationships between various organizations in Germany and Finland. The event by the German-Finnish Chamber of Commerce was a prime example how networking and information sharing can help businesses and non-commercial organizations alike to develop their reach and operations.
“We at the German-Finnish Chamber of Commerce build the ground for good business between both countries. Be it digital edge technology or sustainability, Germans and Finns largely benefit from mutual cooperation and the exchange of ideas. That’s why we frequently bring together companies from the two countries. With their market expertise and experience with German customers, Unikie has once again been an important partner with an excellent feel of pulse on our Spring Forum 2024 and the opportunities of Generative AI.” – Jan Feller, CEO, German-Finnish Chamber of Commerce
Read more about Unikie’s approach to artificial intelligence and machine learning.
