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Digital summit: AI final goal panic
Artificial intelligence as a driver for the economy: This was the defining theme of this year's digital summit. The public sector is particularly attractive as a market, especially the public sector
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Artificial intelligence as a driver for the economy: This was the defining theme of this year's digital summit. The public sector is particularly attractive as a market, especially public administration.
In March there washttps://www.zeit.de/thema/autoindustrie">Volkswagenreported a 44 percent drop in profits. In the eyes of economic experts, this is just one of many markers of how bleak things look in the automotive industry and therefore the German economy as a whole.
However, Germany could find its position as world market leader in another area, according to the federal government and, above all, Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger (CDU) at the digital summit in Berlin. Keyword “artificial intelligence”.
“AI can be our comeback if we fully commit to it,” said the minister in his opening speech on Monday. This offer quickly turns into a resolute demand. Even after deregulation, for example with the EU AI regulation.
Wildberger also wants to pave Germany's path to becoming an AI nation in 2030, as called for in the coalition agreement, by promoting investments in computing power. The latter uses AI in large quantities. From the criticism ofhttps://netzpolitik.org/2026/ki-und-rechenzentren-bundesregierung-weiss-...Resource consumptionHowever, AI is nowhere mentioned at the summit.
AI instead of open source
Overall, critical voices from civil society, for example, were pushed into side events or not even invited. This fits with Wildberger's constant praise of AI. In order to realize the future with AI, Wildberger demands that fewer people have concerns and a clear and comprehensive yes to AI. He relies on speed and risks should not be overestimated. Because in the end it is important not to lose touch in the AI race.
Instead of addressing the risks and explaining how to deal with them, the panelists get lost in big promises about what will be possible with AI in the future. In public administration, for example, it should relieve employees of the work.
True to the motto of the summit, “Shaping AI: safe, sovereign, competitive,” explained Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) at the press conference on Monday: to act confidently, to exercise great creative power. However, Merz did not specify what this creative power looks like and what is meant by “sovereign”. He simply pointed out that Germany had already entered into international partnerships, for examplehttps://www.canada.ca/en/innovation-science-economic-development/news/20...Canadain the form of the Sovereign Technology Alliance (STA). Thematic focus of the alliance: artificial intelligence.
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The alliance is speaking out loudlyhttps://bmds.bund.de/aktuelles/digital-gipfel/programm">ProgramAmong other things, the Canadian AI manufacturer Cohere bought the German AI start-up Aleph Alpha. The two are intended to strengthen “sovereign AI capabilities”. The topic of open source as a means of digital sovereignty was ignored at this year's summit.
Public sector as an attractive market
In order to activate AI as a motor for the economy, digital politicians and representatives from business on the panels voted to make greater use of AI in the public sector and to integrate it into the IT processes of companies and authorities.
According to Wildberger's plans, this will also be used in the federal administration in the future. He wants to transform it into AI. By 2030, it should “charge its processes 90 percent with AI,” as State Secretary Thomas Jarzombek (CDU) put it at the panel on agentic AI “as a game changer for the administration of the future.” The number comes from the new onehttps://bmds.bund.de/fileadmin/BMDS/Documents/Publikationen/Deutschland_...the also new AI task force. More than 90 percent of federal authorities should “use at least one productively used AI application to process core tasks or to relieve the workload of the central department.”
The task force consists of several internal government working groups and had its first meeting in July. It is coordinated by Wildberger's ministry and headed by State Secretary Markus Richter (CDU). The topics on their agenda according to the report: “AI and society, AI security, AI application, AI infrastructure, frontier AI and AI talent”.
The topic of “AI and society” should be about strengthening trust in AI in society and promoting “participation, democracy and social cohesion”. The task force aims to have more than 80 percent of the “population actively use AI applications in their everyday private or professional lives”.
Management in the future via agentic AI
An example of AI in the public sector are agentic AI systems for public administration. Jarzombek (CDU) explained enthusiastically that these should become decisive. Agentic AI already plays a role in the federal administration with functions such as checking the completeness of applications or summarizing multi-page documents. To this end, the Digital Ministry is developing the Spark-AI Workflow project, the tool is intended to help accelerate approval processes.
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The focus is on reducing the workload on staff and significantly shortening the processing time for applications. In the long term, agentic AI should also address the expected personnel shortage overall, as Stephanie Kaiser from DigitalService explains on the panel on agentic AI. By 2035, around 1.5 million administrative employees would retire.
Kaiser is working on the new one together with Philip von Haehling, managing director of the company “PD – Public Sector Consultants”.https://agentische-verwaltung.gov.de/">AgenticAgency Framework. The Ministry of Digital is thus painting the target image of the administration in which “AI agents will carry out many tasks independently” in the future. The framework is still being developed, but in the long term it should enable an administration “that is there for people even when skilled workers are missing”.
Contact person AI
This should then look something like this: citizens can reach the administration via a single point of contact and discuss their concerns not necessarily with an expert, but with the AI. For this purpose, investments should be made in appropriate AI infrastructure. There is money available here that has been lacking for digital public infrastructure for decades.
Agents should then “coordinate with each other in the background across authorities” when processing applications, says Kaiser. Depending on the risk, people check or control where necessary. The agents’ steps must remain comprehensible and controllable. Kaiser and von Haehling did not explain on site how this could realistically be achieved technically.
Rather, they held out the prospect that the administration would be able to cope more easily with the ever-increasing number of incoming applications in the future. That is still a big challenge at the moment. More and more people are generating their applications using AI and it takes significantly less time.
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