DM: The G2K Group has just been named one of the top 100 most innovative companies in Germany. How helpful is that?
Karsten Neugebauer: We are very proud of it. We are continuing on our path to become the German lighthouse company in artificial intelligence (AI) in global markets. But more importantly, our work helps our customers worldwide to become more innovative and successful.
DM: You are among the top 100, even though you only founded G2K in 2013. What was, and what is your vision?
Karsten Neugebauer: I founded the company in 2013 with my partner Omar El Gohary. Our vision is to drive digitalisation forward. Digitisation means making things easier and finding better processes to ensure operational excellence benefits for clients. The client can be a state, a city or a private sector company. We help them to be able to deal with data.
DM: You often emphasise that data is the gold of the modern age. That sounds good, but what does that mean?
Karsten Neugebauer: Yes, data is indeed the gold of the modern age. I can create this gold just like I create oil. But before I drive a car with this oil, I need to put the oil into the refinery. It is no different with data. If I want to create the gold of data and master the data, I must first be able to absorb a lot of data. In order to be able to ingest data, I have to create interfaces to many data suppliers. These can be, for example, cameras that provide data, or access systems, or data from social media. We have built interfaces that bring these data suppliers together in a platform that can be described very well with the term Internet of Things (IoT). Then you have to consider what to do with this data. We are the experts in this technology and develop solutions.
We have seen that we can do things better with data than in the past and that data will be necessary in the future to drive digitalisation. For example: How do I make a city more liveable? Or how do I make a smart city more efficient and sustainable?
DM: How and where do you implement your ideas?
Karsten Neugebauer: Companies are born from visions. My co-founder El Gohary and I certainly belong to the category of visionaries. We got G2K off the ground in Germany and have successively realised successes abroad. For example, in Saudi Arabia, where a new city the size of the whole of Mecklenburg- Vorpommern is being built - "from the scratch", as it were, from the drawing board. It is called Neom City. What is being done there is not so easy to realise in conventional cities. Right from the start, the topic of IoT and AI played a very important role. They looked around the world to see which companies could cooperate, started pilots, carried out tests - and we did it and got the contract! This shows that we have done a lot right with our vision. We are particularly successful in the area of smart cities in the MENA region, where we manage and monitor entire cities via the AI platform Parsifal, for example in the new city of Madinaty next to Cairo. We are not so successful in Germany just yet.
DM: But usually it's American or Asian companies …
Karsten Neugebauer: Somehow a Facebook or an SAP came into being, why shouldn't we be able to use our successes and our partnerships to set up a new large European software company? A company that is able to communicate on an equal footing with competitors from America or Asia? That is our great vision. I also think a bit patriotically: I think we have to step up our game in Germany and Europe.
After all, we have shown that we are capable of developing such solutions and asserting ourselves in international competition abroad on very modern issues and challenges. With the right support and the right partners, I see an opportunity to create something new, something great. We have created the prerequisites in the last few years.
DM: What was the triggering moment for founding the company?
Karsten Neugebauer: The brain of our technology is my founding partner Omar El Gohary. I am more responsible for the market side. We both come from technology backgrounds with different careers, have gained a lot of experience and saw a gap in the market in our previous jobs. Because there are many individual solutions for selective issues, but no platform that is able to bring things together. We know the market, but we have not seen a product, either from large German or foreign software companies, that brings data together and recognises correlations from a large amount of data. We saw this as an opportunity for us.
DM: How do the banks react to your visions?
Karsten Neugebauer: If I were a Swabian company producing textiles in a factory with a chimney and lots of clattering sewing machines, collateral would be easy to identify. But our topics are a platform, software, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. In other words, everything that is not easy to touch. That's why it's important to have organisations like Bürgschaftsbank Berlin that was convinced and inspired, and whose guarantees replace the classic collateral of factories. With this support, we were able to strengthen G2K and go our way.
DM: Isn't Germany far too critical of AI?
Karsten Neugebauer: Critical questions are quite normal, after all, we are working with something that cannot be seen or touched. But often people are looking more for confirmation of fears than answers to questions. But AI can boost business and bring solutions that make life easier. In the end, the most common question is: What can I do to make use of this?
Interview Ewald König