Fabian Westerheide is a founding partner of the AI-focused venture capital investor AI.FUND and has been privately investing in AI companies through Asgard Capital since 2014. As a strategy consultant for public and private institutions, he deals with the question of how artificial intelligence is received in organizations – and why it often fails there. In this article he shares his most important insights from ten years of discussions with medium-sized companies, corporations and startups about digital transformation.
Imagine letting your ten-year-old child walk alone in a neighborhood where dealers, prostitutes, radical preachers, and arms dealers are on every corner. You wouldn’t do it. Never. But that’s exactly what you do every day – as soon as you give your child a smartphone and let them go online unsupervised.
As an investor and father, I see a dangerous discrepancy here. We have been talking about “AI Made in Europe” for years and are looking for the next big industrial policy vision. I have a suggestion for you that doesn’t sound like dry industrial policy – but that’s exactly what it is: child protection as a digital infrastructure. Not as a nice filter app, but as a technological foundation that reconciles ethics and profit.
