“High demand for the AI Service Center for Critical and Sensitive Infrastructures “
At the end of 2022, the project “KI Service Center for Sensitive and Critical Infrastructures” (KISSKI), funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with approximately 17 million euros, started. KISSKI aims to research artificial intelligence (AI) methods and make them available in a highly available service center. One focus is on the fields of medicine and energy, which place particularly high demands on the security of the IT infrastructure. Extensive consulting and training services are also to be developed and provided within the project framework. In order to pursue a customer-oriented approach, a needs analysis in the form of an online survey was developed and conducted by the Fraunhofer Institute and the aQua Institute. The survey ran from April 14 to June 30, 2023 and was disseminated by the KISSKI consortium through multiple channels (newsletters, websites, social media).
Results from the survey.
A total of 118 people participated in the survey: 96 people from the healthcare sector, 14 people from the energy sector, and 8 people indicated that they work in some other sector. As initial interim results show, 67.0% of respondents rate their own experience in using AI as low to somewhat low. At the same time, the need for a protected, external and highly scalable IT environment, such as the one to be established as part of the KISSKI project, is rated as high to very high by 63.5 % of respondents. In addition, a high need for consulting was seen for the following topics: Handling complex data (50.5%), protected IT environment (46.3%), data protection (44.2%) and data preparation (37.9%). These and other results of the needs analysis reinforce the need for a highly available AI service center and contribute to the development of customer-oriented consulting and service offerings in the KISSKI project.
