Today, when driving towards Big Data Expo in Jaarbeurs Utrecht, I listened to the news radio about the Dutch governments ambition to become Europe’s frontrunner on digitisation. Without providing the required structural investments…. Read more about it here (in Dutch).
When driving back I realised how much is already going on in the Netherlands on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning. And it will exponentially grow in the years to come. Some polls showed approximately only 10% of the visitors were actually experimenting or implementing scenarios. So far from being truly insight driven businesses as Forrester is calling frontrunners like Uber, Tesla and Airbnb.
Although very nice examples were shared, for example by Rabobank which is experimenting customer interaction by a robot (article), I also noticed the absence of large Dutch enterprises like Philips, Shell and Unilever. They were predominantly in the news lately because the Dutch cabinet wants to please them to safeguard employability. I suggest them in return to pick up a predominant role in helping us to become thé digitisation champion of Europe.
Speaking of Europe. It is standing still, according to Rob van Kranenburg, Founder of the nr 1 IoT ecology accelerator Council theinternetofthings.eu. We’re used to smart watches, cars, houses and cities. Now we are heading towards a democracy where governmental decisions are being made on big data, smart society. China is already far ahead and he warned we need to accelerate and prevent all the power to end up at a few big American companies owning our data.
To round it up positively, lector of the year Gerard Schouten of Fontys, very nicely explained how students are being prepared to excel in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Via internships solutions which prefills travel and expenses claims automatically by just scanning tickets and, how more dutch can it be, predict when cows will become ill. There’s so much potential, up to us all to unlock it!
