Wallonia's place in the artificial intelligence race.

Where does Wallonia stand? What contribution are our small and medium-sized businesses making to global competition in artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence represents a means of modernizing existing industries. Wallonia's advantage lies in its specific industrial fabric, as well as in the proximity between these companies and players specializing in artificial intelligence.

Indeed, Wallonia has historically been home to major players in CRM software publishing, such as Odoo and Simple CRM, with CRM software being a major future (or even current) consumer and producer of AI.  If we focus on these two innovative companies, the good news is to note their attachment to the Walloon region and their desire to keep their economic, technological and human roots in our territory.

Wallonia's size is frequently cited as a challenge. What if we were to see it as an opportunity, by becoming the main driving force behind the implementation of efficient methodologies in terms of energy costs, necessary infrastructures, investments and ethics?

There is a real opportunity to achieve technological breakthroughs by focusing on business modernization through collaboration with companies expert in artificial intelligence. Indeed, the development of artificial intelligence solutions is a discipline in its own right. Federations, competitiveness clusters and support organizations all play a key role in identifying companies' needs, and enabling digital experts to offer assistance tailored to those needs. Forem, for its part, has brought together players from the academic and business worlds for several workshops, starting in 2019, to define the professions of tomorrow, both from the point of view of cutting-edge professions (data scientist, data engineer, etc.) as well as more operational professions (data breeder, dataset quality controller, etc.).  

Clearly, Wallonia currently faces two major challenges in building its place in the new AI economy: data and computing power.

Clearly, we need to improve data sharing to create synergies between Walloon companies. Indeed, providing access to real data will enable the development of artificial intelligence models that can be exported to similar industries.

Finally, to facilitate the development of Walloon companies providing artificial intelligence products and/or services, it is crucial to make computing capacity available to them. At present, this mainly concerns universities and research centers, since of course there is always the opportunity to turn to the public clouds of US players Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

The media are constantly talking about generative artificial intelligences such as ChatGPT, but they are also arousing suspicion in the eyes of Walloon citizens and businesses about this little-known technology.

This wave of contradictory information raises doubts among businesses, which are both tempted to adopt this high-potential technology and fear that it will replace humans.

The results of the Corporate Digital Maturity Barometer show an increase from 7 to 39% in the adoption of artificial intelligence by companies with 10 or more employees between 2021 and 2023.

Artificial intelligence fascinates, but it also generates many fears. Today, there is a cruel lack of understanding of the issues, opportunities and risks associated with artificial intelligence. Raising awareness and educating people about artificial intelligence technologies is becoming a priority for Wallonia.

Artificial intelligence is a fabulous tool for encouraging public services to be as innovative as possible and to improve service to citizens, particularly by promoting the use of technologies developed in Wallonia.

Wallonia needs to remain attractive to engineers and players in this field, particularly in financial terms. Unfortunately, the new copyright legislation has seriously removed an element of optimization. Indeed, the market is tight, and resources could migrate to large companies with the means to pay excessively high salaries.

In addition, it is essential to support the efforts needed to define the product/market fit. This stage is crucial to the design of solutions that can be scaled up to the international market, focusing investment on solutions with the greatest probability of creating value quickly. We need to cultivate a product development culture.