Is Europe hamstrung by the precedence of privacy?

Dr AI, Wanli Min, discusses Europe’s privacy conundrum, the East-West dichotomy, and AI for a better future

AS Europe deliberates over how data and AI should be used on the continent, the East charges ahead, leaving regulators (or lack thereof) to figure things out as they go. We are now at a tipping point for the continent; Europe remains a global leader in many high-tech industries, but the speed of innovation in China is startling, and the gap continues to widen; a quick look at the number of tech unicorns created since 2017 illuminates the chasm.

Image: Cbinsights/OECD/Eurostat/DG Research and Innovation — Unit for Analysis and Monitoring of National Research and Innovation Policies

At the Platform Economy Summit in Frankfurt, Germany, Wanli Min aka Dr AI, a former chief data scientist at Alibaba shared his insights and perspective on data, east versus west and the threats that Europe faces going forward.

Europe has the chance now, if pan-European alignment can be achieved, to create ‘huge data volumes.’ A century-old reserve of data can be transformed if the “right toolset or computation platform can be used to monetise and analyse this data,” says Wanli.

A rich reserve of data lies hidden in incumbent businesses in Europe, which if tapped into could be the source of a new competitive advantage.

“Many market players in China are monetising very quickly on the same set of data and if they move faster than Europe, the AI Gap in addition to the digitalisation gap between Europe and the Far East will widen.”

As debates rage on in European institutions about how to deal with privacy issues, cities like Hangzhou, in Eastern China are powering on with initiatives like the Alibaba ‘city brain’, where artificial intelligence gathers information across the city from intersection cameras and GPS data on the locations of cars and buses.

Kai-Fu Lee, venture capitalist and author of AI Superpowers says “the more data, the better the AI is, just like the more you know, the smarter you are.”

In China people are more willing to trade their personal privacy data for convenience or safety.

~Kai-Fu Lee

But, Dr Wang Jian, Chairman of Alibaba Tech Committee, in an interview with the Economist podcast on Sep 25th, suggests that “Chinese people are more willing to try new things.” Wanli Min echoes this mentality of acting first, planning second:

“Don’t debate, don’t sit and debate. Innovation is not the outcome of debate, innovation is the outcome of action. As long as new value is created, nobody will argue with the result.”

So, is it a case that we are just less adventurous in Europe? Wanli alludes to Europe’s ‘great history.’ “All the heritage of their great grandparents. They were very hard working. But they didn’t realise that the threat is coming much quicker than they thought.”

So is our lack of openness a symptom of our success? “Protection is not going to support innovation because at the end of the day if you want to explore or innovate — you need to think outside of the box,” says Wanli.

And, while he espouses the need for open exploration and laments how “regulations essentially try to draw a boundary around what we can or cannot do, but in the process of value discovery and exploration, we should have more encouragement than discouragement.”

Nowhere is this more true than in the corporate space. So how can CEOs change their business to be more sustainable and relevant for the digital era? Wanli asserts that corporates need to define the ‘real problem’.

“Very often people fail in a process of change not due to technology but because they lack a clear value proposition.”

He adds that once the right problem is identified, “it’s got to have a tangible impact, a measurable impact not just for the sake of technology, not for the sake of innovation; you have to solve a real problem that benefits people in a geographical region or vertical industry.

And this has to be clearly defined. This is challenging because it’s not just a business decision, it requires the CEO, C-level, and tech experts, to work with politicians to co-define the objective and once the objective is defined the technology solution is easy, with all these smart people, technology is the easy part,” Wanli adds.

AI for a better future is the slogan of Alibaba Cloud. What can AI do to improve society? And is there anything we should be cautious about?

“The potential is huge in every sector, but also for society, from city management like the ‘city brain’ to manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, any data-intensive sector will benefit from AI and in return AI will create a better future for everybody.”

However, it’s not all fanfare. We have to realise the possible side effects.

“It has to be put into law in way that you already have a well defined use case and if you want to replicate this use case to a mass population, you have to come up with regulations to prevent sabotage. But in the deep discovery stage it is too early to come up with the regulations.”

So, for example, camera security; very often in China, you see a lot of surveillance cameras in the sky. They can capture vehicles on the streets, but they can also capture the faces of pedestrians.

“Imagine if somebody accessed that data and they got the facial recognition and then they can potentially recover the trajectory of any person in the city, which is scary.”

“If you want to do this kind of business, I think it has to be carefully reviewed by the government. Always personally identifiable information should be treated with the highest standards,” Wanli clarifies. No easy task, then, for European commissioners who want to both stimulate innovation, but also respect privacy rights at the same time.

As platforms become a mainstay in the new globally interconnected economy, data and how it is handled needs to be a high priority. When I asked Wanli if he was advising a CEO — who has no idea about AI and the platform economy — about how to get started, he points to three key principles: first, identify three pain points in a given sector.

Second, rate these by their potential to generate revenue— if the pain point is resolved. And third, ask yourself is it diversified? By diversified, he explains “does the platform have different players from distinct sub-sectors? If it only has healthcare, for example, then it probably won’t work. Because at the end of the day, you need a platform across industries to create new value. So, I mean the diversity of the platform will help you a lot,” Wanli says.

Little surprise, then, that executives are anxious about the sudden change to the corporate landscape. What worked before, is slowly becoming less relevant. The word disruption is a cliche, but say that to Peter Fankhauser, CEO of Thomas Cook—the world’s oldest travel firm

Wanli considers The Fightback Movement, a collection of entrepreneurs, CxOs, investors, and policy-makers in Europe, a step in the right direction. Because it can’t be done in silos, in parliament buildings, or in boardrooms alone, but by working together under one banner: making the future better.

Wanli considers the Fightback Movement “a wake-up call to multiple parties. It’s not only to the CEO level but also to younger generations as well.” The Fightback Movement is a call to incumbents, as we look to the fast-paced changes in China and the US, to stimulate the desire and ambition in older generations to encourage younger generations to go for it.

“If you take action now and you create healthy competition across the world economic system then it’s going to benefit the entire world economy because everybody will be working together, so we are all winners.”