Germany has long been famous for its high quality engineering and manufacturing. But the future of both is all about software: automation and artificial intelligence. You want to be a player in that future? You’re going to have people working here, in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In a splashy ad that aired recently during the Super Bowl, Mercedes-Benz boasted about a new, Siri-like technology available in its entry level model.
Santa Clara-based SoundHound is the company behind the technology and Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes, has access to it because it invested in the start up last year.
It’s a textbook example of a big company buying something fresh from outside. It’s also the kind of partnership Mercedes-Benz Director of Open Innovation Ben Boeser puts together from the auto giant’s 300+ employee satellite in Sunnyvale.
“We have a big presence here for all of our AI and data topics, and they run like any other Silicon Valley company,” Boeser explained. In a similar fashion, there’s a relatively independent outpost for cloud computing in Seattle.
“The world decided that the next revolution will start here, and everybody centered people here. There’s a lot of small companies that are setting up shop and bringing out new innovations. And in that sense, whatever we see here is maybe two or three years ahead of the curve. It’s absolutely mandatory for automotives to be here these days, because this is where everybody is, and where everybody innovates,” Boeser said.
Daimler has its own R&D people in Stuttgart, of course. But there are all kinds of reasons why that’s not good enough to ensure Daimler survives the next decade. To start with, there’s the UN’s Vienna Convention on Road Traffic, which restricts what can be tested in Europe. You can drive crazy fast on the Autobahn. But when self-driving Mercedes taxis take test drives later this year on public streets, they’ll be toodling around San Jose, not Stuttgart.
Like Americans, Germans are also worried about how AI technology is regulated. But automakers can’t afford to wait on the side of the road while the public policy advances. China isn’t waiting. Silicon Valley isn’t waiting.
“There is a place for caution. But the best way to tame future abuses of our data is to be among the players as rule makers, not rule takers,” wrote former business and technology reporter Andreas Kluth in an OP/ED for the recently defunct digital news outlet Handlesbrott Today. In the essay, called Why Germans Will Be Left Behind in Artificial Intelligence, Kluth warns, “Germans are living in a comfortable present, oblivious to an uncertain future. Sure, it’s nice to have a Mittelstand that makes the world’s best ventilators, ball bearings, and screws. And next?”