Founders’ Takes is a new series with experienced findings of technical managers who change industries with artificial intelligence. In this issue, Lucas Sprider, founder of the German Startup Ventup Venta AI, shares his vision of AI employees.
Artificial intelligence enable the most dramatic shift of the century: the transition from human work to AI work. In the coming years, companies will not only use AI as a tool.
This shift is inevitable. The real question is: whose employees will we hire? If Europe does not catch up with the USA and China and builds up its own AI employees, we can outsource a large part of our economic value creation – or as we call it Germans. Value creation: The core of how we produce prosperity.
Condition of the AI
The breakthrough delivered in 2022 with OpenAis Chatgpt. It has been proven that knowledge work could be automated on a scale: research, writing, coding, analysis – everything suddenly possible through software instead of people. The emergence of AI agents continues to lead these skills.
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For agents, AI models can not only react to text inputs, but also take on entire tasks. Today, AI is able to plan, mediate and carry out workflows for tools and channels.
Openai still dominates this field, closely integrated with Microsoft – but the competition has become violent. Google has caught up its Gemini models, Meta with Lama and anthropically with Claude. Nevertheless, there is a pattern: The managers of today’s AI revolution are almost exclusively American tech giants who not only develop and control the models, but also the infrastructure and workflows that are operated worldwide.
Her biggest challenger comes from the east. With Deepseek, China showed that it is possible to catch up – and quickly. The system exceeded many western models on benchmarks while it was carried out with radically lower computing costs. Beijing’s difficult state support ensures that China does not stay a trailer for long.
State of Europe
Long before Chatgpt became a known name, European researchers laid the basis for modern AI.
In the late 1980s, Yann Lecun (Université Pierre-Et-Marie, Paris) was pioneering work with folding networks (CNNS) and formed the basis for computer vision and multimodal AI. In 1997 Sepp Hochreiter and Jürgen Schmidhuber (TU Munich) invented long networks of short -term memory (LStM), crucial for speech recognition, translation and NLP.
In 2016, Deepmind Deepmind defeated the world when Alphago defeated the world champion Lee Sedol, while the Compvis Group from LMU Munich under the direction of Professor Björn Ommer, Advanced Generative AI, which culminated in stable distribution.
The paradox is clear: Europe invents, others commercialize. Lecun switched to Meta, Deepmind was taken over by Google and the stable diffusion was monetized through stability in London and the USA.
A new generation of European AI companies tries to change this. France’s Mistral is aimed at the claim of Europe on sovereign AI, the establishment of open source LELMs and enterprise tools such as Le Chat that attracted customers such as AXA and BNP Paribas. Black Forest Laboratory, which were turned out of the same LMU team behind stable diffusion, builds one of the most powerful image generators and aims to maintain the latest research and commercialization in Europe.
Other startups like Germany’s long dock have taken a different path. Instead of creating foundation models themselves, they enable companies to use existing LLMs and at the same time keep the data and workflows in the house.
The upcoming increase in AI employees
We only scratch what AI can do on the surface. Today’s models-powerful how they may be like it early. The actual value does not result from the models themselves, but from the way we use them: automation of workflows, tightening of processes and effective AI employees who can do complex tasks across companies.
This is a golden opportunity for Europe. Our industries are highly efficient and clearly defined rule-based workflow accuracy of the kind of environment in which AI thrives. Manufacturing, logistics, finance, insurance and even customer support can expand massive potential or replaced by AI systems that can follow documented procedures, make decisions and perform entire processes autonomously.
Monetarization on the head is enormous. Every workflow that can be automated is an opportunity to reduce costs, improve speed and scale the process. And in contrast to the AI hype with consumers, this value is tangible: it is directly in the productivity and efficiency of companies.
But the clock ticks. If Europe is not acting now to train, use and integrate AI employees on site, we risk becoming passive consumers. AI work is imported from the USA together with the associated added value. Instead of leading the next industrial revolution, we will pay foreign providers to run our business.
The challenge of Europe – and its chance – is clear: transform its existing industrial advantage into a local AI workforce. The companies that succeed in creating, training and scaling AI employee here will define the next wave of economic management.
A first battlefield for AI employees: sales automation
If there is an area on which AI employee already proves their value, it is sales automation. Sales workflows are often very manual, repeated and regular-based-based from the creation of lead lists and the monitoring of markets to the creation of outreach emails and even cold calls. This makes it a natural playground for AI, which can follow clear processes and perform tasks on a scale.
The startup 11x.ai demonstrated the potential and the risks. Originally from Great Britain, the team moved after a 50 million. -Dollar -Financing round to the USA and claimed to have created “digital workers” with “human results” with which sales workflows from prospectus can be automated to the end of offers. They grew quickly, but their claims attracted the exam: a Techcrunch examination emphasized that they had to deal with customer loyalty, which led to the CEO back. Nevertheless, your increase shows the massive value and the speed with which AI can change sales.
But a system like 11x.ai would have been difficult in Europe. The sales emphasize the quality of quantity, strict regulations restrict undesirable e -mail public relations, and the GDPR regulates any contact point for data processing. An American AI employee simply cannot drop in European workflows.
That is why my startup Venta Ai is pursuing a localized approach. Instead of pursuing a global market, our team in Germany designs AI sales employee who are tailored to European details and respect cultural standards, legal limits and data protection standards. When our founder, Lucas Spree, said Handelsblatt: “You would not hire an American for a German sales role – and the same applies to AI.”
Europe’s choice
Europe has talent, research and industrial efficiency to lead the next wave of AI work – but only if it is now. The increase in AI employees is inevitable, and the real value is in the way in which these models are used, not just their raw skills. By building AI systems that respect European workflows, culture and compliance, startups such as Mistral, Black Forest Labor, Langdock and Venta AI transform a potential susceptibility into opportunities.
The message is clear: Europe can either import AI work from the USA and fall back or create their own AI employees and capture the economic and strategic value of this transformation. The choice will define the role of the continent in the AI-powered economy of tomorrow.
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