"With the AI marketplace, we are offering companies a central place to solve their challenges in product development with the help of AI. And it gives AI providers direct access to their customers," explains Leon Özcan, project coordinator and research associate at the Heinz Nixdorf Institute at Paderborn University. The platform will now be launched on March 26, 2021.

The functions of the AI marketplace

The AI marketplace platform will be successively expanded with new functionalities over the course of the project. Initially, users will be offered a matching function: Companies can post challenges here, for example, while AI providers create skills profiles. Subsequent matching of challenges with skills profiles brings together suitable platform players who can then develop solutions together.

The next step is to create a protected data room for development and test data in order to continuously improve AI applications and adapt them to customer needs. The AI marketplace relies on certified standards that guarantee data sovereignty and at the same time form the basis for fair cooperation.
Ulrich Ahle, CEO of the Fiware Foundation, outlines the vision of the project: "The AI marketplace will revolutionize the development of new products, especially in medium-sized companies. Artificial intelligence will be made usable, data will be made more usable. After all, data is the gold of the 21st century and the AI marketplace, like other marketplaces, will change the way products are created."

The ecosystem

Since the beginning of 2020, the AI marketplace has been creating a unique ecosystem across Germany that companies can use to tap into the potential of AI in product development. The nucleus of the ecosystem is the it's OWL technology network.
At the heart of the AI marketplace is the platform of the same name, where providers, users and experts can develop and exchange solutions for AI. The vision is a marketplace that offers intelligent matching as well as a protected space for secure data exchange and data sovereignty. There will also be an app store for AI solutions and a range of standardized AI modules that can be combined as required and used for the development of new AI solutions. The project consortium consists of 19 research institutions, networks and companies.
The AI Marketplace project is being funded from January 2020 to December 2022 as part of the innovation competition "Artificial intelligence as a driver for economically relevant ecosystems" organized by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi).