Expert Roundtable: Sovereign AI for Industry

Outline

AI is moving beyond screens and digital applications to become an integral part of industrial products, processes and systems. For Europe and Japan this transformation raises important business and strategic questions: how can industrial companies capture the value created by AI? Which capabilities need to be developed and retained internally? How can dependency on external providers be minimised?
This expert roundtable will bring together European and Japanese business leaders, industry and technology experts and policymakers for a focused discussion on AI in the industrial sector. Two keynote addresses will provide complementary perspectives: the first will examine the role of industrial AI within Japan's Growth Strategy, including current priorities, investment needs and remaining bottlenecks; the second, from the perspective of a business/technology leader, will explore how AI is reshaping industrial competitiveness, products, services and business models.

Two panels with industry experts will follow. The first, titled “The sovereignty challenge: Compute, data and industrial dependence”, will address what sovereign AI means in an industrial context and assess Europe and Japan's current capabilities and dependencies across data, models, compute and deployment infrastructure. The second panel, titled “The deployment challenge: Putting AI on the factory floor”, will focus on real industrial applications and the obstacles companies face in moving from experimentation to large-scale deployment, including data quality, interoperability, cybersecurity, skills, reliability and return on investment.

Drawing on strategic perspectives and industrial experience, the roundtable aims to identify not only the opportunities and the challenges created by AI in the industrial sector, but also the capabilities, partnerships and investments required for Europe and Japan to remain competitive and retain control over the intelligence shaping the future of industry. It will also examine two closely connected challenges:

• The strategic challenge of technological sovereignty and dependence
• The practical challenge of deploying AI successfully in real industrial environments

Agenda