A start-up with 130 years of experience
KI-Kompass of the VBKI - this time with the KIRA project of the German Pension Insurance, among others
Text: Philipp Zettl | Policy Officer
The billion-euro Stargate project to create a general artificial intelligence (AI) is presented in the USA. The new Chinese AI model DeepSeek destroys 600 billion euros worth of chip manufacturer Nvidia in one day. Artificial intelligence is on everyone's lips again these days. So it's just the right time to present various AI projects from Berlin companies together with Deutsche Rentenversicherung Bund.
It all started with the pension insurance company itself, which its director, Stephan Fasshauer, presented as a "startup with 130 years of experience". Long before the ChatGPT boom, Rentenversicherung Bund has been working with AI since 2020 in order to counteract the double demographic change of age-related retirements and a lack of young talent. Dr. Michael Tekieli, Head of the AI Lab in the Digital Strategy Unit, presented the first KIRA project, with 20 more to follow in the near future. KIRA helps auditors to check whether a company has paid social security contributions in full or whether additional claims need to be made. KIRA uses more than 11,000 characteristics to create a score from 1, inconspicuous, to 10 and thus significantly reduces the number of companies to be checked: "If we follow the KIRA recommendation with a score of 1, we can ignore 50 percent of all audit cases and still identify 94.4 percent of all additional claims," Tekieli reported enthusiastically.





Afterwards, Business AI Lead Dr. Sandra Hestermann from Cornelsen Verlag demonstrated how cornelsen.AI can already support teachers in everyday school life. Cornelsen has developed a toolbox to relieve teachers of non-teaching tasks, from lesson preparation to the automated correction of tasks. In a live demonstration, the AI-Lead created teaching materials for a class, adapted to the federal state, the learning plan and the competence objective. The highlight: if required, the program creates different materials for children with different needs so that each child can learn at their own pace. With the AI correction assistant, which also recognizes handwriting, pupils can also receive learning goal-related feedback more quickly and more frequently. In the future, there will also be an AI learning assistant for pupils.
Moderator Dr Norman Bernhardt, member of the VBKI-Digital project team, opened the second half of the event with a presentation on the most important findings from his work with the introduction of digitalization and AI projects in companies. Depending on the application, it may be better to purchase an existing system or program your own tool. The latter has the advantage of being tailored to individual needs and thus achieving the greatest effect. However, the first digitization projects in particular often quickly become too complex to plan. His advice: "Think big, but start small and keep it simple."
Dr. Nils Barnickel from SAILWINT concluded the event. His start-up plans to produce hydrogen with autonomous wind turbine ships on the North Sea. To maximize the energy production of the turbines, AI will predict the optimal wind course and guide the container ship-sized vessels to the offshore terminal at the right time.
The next AI Compass events will again take place as webinars at 8:15 in the morning: On March 4, Lars Löhn will talk about ChatGPT and other AI agents and on March 27, Dr. Annika von Mutius will talk about AI-based recruiting solution.
Impressions
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