Hamburg News: What are your plans for the future?
Wegner: I'm currently pursuing two major strategies. The first is to make AI solutions easy and quick for everyone to use, for instance, by offering AI as a service. Until now, the development of AI has tended to focus on custom programming, for which AI experts frequently had to be found and trained first. That made projects lengthy and expensive. On top of that, only large and financially buoyant companies were able to handle such projects. Thanks to cloud services, AI has come within the reach of mid-sized companies. AI as a service lowers the barriers because the provider has already solved many sub-problems. Companies can benefit from AI far faster as a result.
My second strategy is to make the Artificial Intelligence & Data Analytics business unit at Lufthansa Industry Solutions "a well-known and recognized large AI team in Germany. We already have a very skilled and experienced team with a long history of bringing AI cases to production and generating business impact. We are now growing this team and aim to more than double in size in next year.
Hamburg News: Why should there be more women in AI?
Wegner: AI is trained by humans or data, so we bring our personal perspective to the training. If you think about a tennis or soccer coach, for instance, the personal touch alway rubs off on the players, whether it's the spin or the rituals before a match. For that reason, players are advised to change their coaches every now and then. Not because the coaches do a bad job, but simply to gain a new perspective. The game would not evolve significantly, if there were only one type of coach for players all over the world. Players who not fit in would be rejected. When those criteria are applied to AI, that means the technology must cover every possible perspective to progress everywhere.
AI should not be discriminatory. Thus, gender diversity in AI is crucial to its success. I believe that for AI to unfold its promise as a solution, more women are needed to bring diversity to the existing sphere of AI creators and trainers and to remove prejudice. If diversity in AI is neglected, we run the risk of potentiating the gender gap we have been fighting for so long and continuing to neglect minorities, who are the only ones challenging the status quo.
ae/tn/sb/pb
