How will products be developed in the future? This question is being answered in the AI Marketplace project launched in January. Here, 20 companies and research institutions and 35 associated partners are working on building an ecosystem around a digital platform that brings together AI experts, solution providers and manufacturing companies. The AI marketplace works in a similar way to well-known marketplaces in the consumer sector. A manufacturer of machines, for example, has access to research results from the field of artificial intelligence via the AI marketplace. It can then use these results to adapt them for its own product development without the need for time-consuming and cost-intensive in-house research. "The potential applications of AI are manifold. Manufacturing companies can combine the information of existing products and research results, virtually run through several product variants and ultimately manufacture the optimal end product," explains Professor Volker Lohweg, Director of the Institute for Industrial Information Technology (inIT), which is involved in the AI Marketplace project as a competent partner for data analysis and AI applications.
Product creation is a particular focus here, as product innovations in Germany generated sales of €822 billion (year 2017). At the same time, 85% of production costs are determined during product creation. The potential of the AI marketplace offers opportunities to increase development capacity by up to 19%, reduce development time by up to 17%, and lower manufacturing costs by up to 13%. However, few companies are yet exploiting this potential because they often lack the necessary AI expertise or have reservations about the security of their data. In turn, providers of AI solutions often lack access to customers or the necessary domain knowledge. "And this is exactly where the AI marketplace comes in, by creating a platform for providers and demanders, and in particular to support SMEs in making artificial intelligence usable for themselves," describes Alexander Dicks, research associate at inIT.
The AI Marketplace project is funded with 11 million euros from January 2020 to December 2022 in the innovation competition "Artificial Intelligence as a Driver for Economically Relevant Ecosystems" of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi); the partners invest an additional 5 million euros. Further information on the project is available at ki-marktplatz.com.