I recently did an interview with the German Handelsblatt on where AI actually stands in the German Mittelstand, and I didn't hold back on the uncomfortable parts.

The honest answer: most companies are still in "trying things out" mode. Everyone has tested a chatbot or let a few people play with ChatGPT. But there's a massive gap between an impressive demo and something that runs in production and actually moves the numbers.

Why? Driven by the ME-TOO algorithm: "We also do AI." No clear use cases, messy or unusable data, no safe way to wire it into existing systems, and often simply not enough internal competence to make good calls.

My #1 advice to decision-makers

Build real technological understanding before you build anything else. Every new technology demands a certain level of understanding; without it, you make bad decisions. Cookie banners are the textbook example: regulation written without understanding the underlying tech, solving nothing while making life harder for millions of people. If we get AI wrong the same way, we'll get the same kind of well-meaning mess.

Agent vs. chatbot

I also talked about what an "AI agent" really is, compared to just another chatbot. A chatbot is request-response, done. An agent works in a continuous loop: it reasons, breaks a task into subtasks and takes actions through interfaces that we as developers build. And that's the key point I keep repeating: the model itself doesn't act or decide. The responsibility for what actually happens sits with the software and the developers who build those interfaces.

That distinction gets lost far too often in political and regulatory discussions.

One more thing worth saying clearly

Language models don't "understand" in the human sense. They calculate probable next words. That means they can sound convincing and still be wrong. For real logical reasoning, guaranteed-correct numbers or reliable facts, a language model alone is not enough.

Read the full article (in German): KI im Mittelstand – Handelsblatt

Digitalisierung #AI #KI #ArtificialIntelligence #SoftwareEngineering #Innovation #Mittelstand #daenet

Originally published on LinkedIn.