Empowering Swiss SMEs for Responsible AI Adoption
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of Switzerland’s economy. Successful adoption of AI by SMEs is hindered by barriers including technological complexity, uncertainty about regulatory requirements and limited resources. In a recent article at the KMU magazine, Ricardo Chavarriaga, lead of the Responsible AI group at CAI describes strategies to overcome them and highlights how Responsible AI can help SMEs to turn the AI potential into business and societal value.
In a recent article at the KMU Magazine, Ricardo CHAVARRIAGA, leader of the CAI Responsible AI Innovation group, discusses the benefits of adopting Responsible AI and how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can overcome hindering factors and turn the AI potential into business and societal value.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of Switzerland’s economy. SMEs make up over 99% of the commercial companies and create two-thirds of the jobs in Switzerland. The growing market for AI-based innovation is a great opportunity for Swiss SMEs, given the access to highly qualified talent, economic stability, and global recognition. However, successful adoption of AI by SMEs is hindered by multiple barriers including technological complexity, uncertainty about regulatory requirements and limited resources.
The Business Impact of Responsible AI
Successful adoption of Responsible AI practices can offer SMEs reduction of costs and complexity of the assessment process, facilitating risk management and compliance; fostering transparency and trust signalling to downstream developers and clients; facilitating procurement processes by enabling structured assessing process; and accelerating time-to-market for AI-based solutions.
Enabling factors for AI adoption
- Streamlined public funding mechanisms and further encouragement for private investors.
- Access to performant, reliable infrastructure for computing power and data management that fulfils requirements for data sovereignty, cyber-security protection, and fair pricing mechanisms.
- Access to technical and governance tools and services that can support SME AI development processes.
Strategic empowerment
Support for strategy development is the major factor for enabling successful AI adoption for SMEs. The ability to identify the business value that AI can create for the organisations, informed by a clear identification of the pain points and accurate assessment of the current capacity enables the SMEs to ask the right questions and choose the best support on their AI journey. This will enable them to appropriate planning, execute and scale AI-related solutions that are effective, sustainable and impactful.
The Swiss Centre for Responsible AI (SCRAI), a ZHAW lead initiative, provides support on the decision of AI strategy and governance, adoption of responsible AI practices and increase AI literacy. Feel free to contacts us and let’s build Responsible AI together.
Readthe article (in German): https://www.kmu-magazin.ch/wissen/branchen-maerkte/responsible-ai-als-chance-fuer-schweizer-kmu
Note: This article summarizes is part of a series on AI produced in collaboration with the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW) and the Swiss AI Research Overview Platform (SAIROP). SAIROP promotes exchange between academia, industry, and society, highlights Swiss AI expertise, and provides guidance within the dynamic AI ecosystem.
Contact: Ricardo Chavarriaga (char@zhaw.ch)