HES-SO joins forces with 5 of its engineering schools in Western Switzerland to create the Centre Suisse d'Intelligence Artificielle pour les PME (CSIA). AI is coming into our societies and is already widely adopted by large organizations, while SMEs don't always know how to integrate it according to their needs. The CSIA's aim is to support SMEs in this digital transition, so that they remain competitive.
SMEs in Switzerland account for 3 million jobs in 590,000 companies, or 60% of the working population. The digital transition is a major challenge for SMEs, impacting all areas from administration and production to sales and purchasing. In this digital transition, many SMEs could increase their competitiveness and avoid relocations by accelerating the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their digital portfolio. Indeed, the players predict numerous AI use cases for SMEs: targeting marketing and sales, greater efficiency in processing customer service-related documents, optimizing finances, decision support, predictive maintenance, and this in all fields including retail, healthcare, energy and construction.
Currently, AI developments are extremely rapid, accompanied by a democratization of costs. Worldwide investment in AI doubled from 2020 to 2021, and the trend continues for 2022 and 2023, indicating strong activity in the creation of tools and services. Aware of these developments, the Federal Council has made AI a central theme of its "Digital Switzerland" strategy. Many AI projects are indeed being launched, but mainly at the level of large companies and organizations. The adoption of AI by SMEs remains difficult. Various obstacles are cited, such as lack of knowledge, difficulty in accessing local human skills and significant investment. Two other key factors are also at play. The first is data security, with AI components mainly involving the use of cloud services, often outsourced outside Switzerland. The second relates to the sustainability of AI, which by its very nature needs to be updated frequently as contexts evolve.
To help demystify AI and overcome these obstacles, HES-SO has decided to launch the Swiss Center for Artificial Intelligence (CSIA) project for SMEs. The CSIA aims to bring together the AI skills of the 5 HES-SO engineering schools in French-speaking Switzerland and offer SMEs access to a range of tools for faster adoption and deployment, such as tools for data preparation, rapid prototyping, quality control, bias detection and retraining. Another of the center's missions is to provide services to support SMEs in the areas of knowledge acquisition, use case identification and preparation for AI accreditation.
Bringing together its 5 engineering sites with access to over 100 engineers and researchers active in AI, the HES-SO is positioned as a leading partner in this field. The Center will act as a catalyst for local expertise, and offer services to accelerate the adoption of AI in areas useful to SMEs.
Discover the Swiss AI Center website