Simone Friese
Chief of Staff | Innovation Scout for Baden Württemberg
+1 (415) 248 1249 sfriese@gaccwest.com
There were many things discussed at the BIC Conference. One idea kept resurfacing from every stage, whether the speaker was talking about robots, hospitals, or the Mittelstand: the hardest part of adopting a new technology is almost never the technology itself. It's the data feeding it, the culture receiving it, and the people expected to change how they work.
1. In robotics, hardware is no longer the problem
Keynote speaker Maks Giordano opened with a status check on AI and robotics – deliberately separating the hype from the reality: humanoid robots are quietly but steadily becoming an everyday phenomenon.
And while the mechanics are already impressive, it's now the training data that's becoming the new bottleneck. Giordano's example says it all: a New York startup offers to clean people's apartments for free – provided the cleaners wear motion-capture suits to gather movement data for training robots. The frontier has shifted: from building the robot to teaching it.
2. AI is a culture problem in an IT costume
The biggest mistake companies make: treating AI as an IT or CDO topic rather than a change-and-culture one.
Copilot-style assistants get rolled out company-wide — and then only a fraction of employees actually use them, often because nobody told them what they're even allowed to do with them. The solution isn't more technology, but clear guidelines and human permission.
The lesson for the Mittelstand: the ROI on culture beats the ROI on any single tool.
3. The reality check is here – and that's a good thing
Technology is often overestimated in the short term and underestimated in the long term.
AI is currently in its overhype phase – and the "reality check" is now setting in. Companies are realizing that not every process needs an AI agent, and that, in Maks Giordano's words, humans are still pretty good at what they do.
And yet: AI continues to shift market realities at a rapid pace, with new trends emerging by the minute (from GEO to increasingly mature agentic workflows to automated buyers making purchasing decisions). And all of it rests on one rather unglamorous prerequisite: clean data and clear API thinking. Or, to put it less politely: garbage in, garbage out – no matter how good the model is.
4. Germany is connected on paper, but not in practice
In her talk on what COVID-19 revealed about digitalization in the German healthcare system, Serdil Dogan described the pandemic as an X-ray of the system's digital maturity – and the diagnosis was unsparing: disconnected, unprepared, overwhelmed.
Pathogen test results shuttled back and forth between labs and health authorities by fax and paper form. Coordinating available intensive-care beds happened by phone, with no central register. Health authorities ran incompatible software – and warnings about exactly this incompatibility had been on record since 2018.
Dogan's central distinction carries far beyond healthcare: Germany is technically connected, but not truly interoperable. The infrastructure is there; the flow isn't. Her conclusion mirrored the whole day: technology alone isn't enough.
Leadership and change management decide whether digital tools are actually adopted or quietly ignored.
5. The Mittelstand's strength is real – if it's willing to stop a project
In the closing panel, our own Simone Friese (GACC West), together with Rafael Baur (Wenglor) and Tomislav Lang, turned to a topic on many participants' minds: Germany versus Silicon Valley.
For Germany, the dual-education system, adaptable skilled workers, and a strong engineering mindset remain genuine advantages. At the same time, a startup often gets only one shot, while a Mittelständler with 100–150 engineers tied up in day-to-day business can't simply pull ten people off to work on something new. That takes the courage to change – best illustrated by Rafael Baur, who, after returning from Silicon Valley, deliberately stopped an internal project team mid-process, treating a controlled failure as part of the process rather than something to punish.
That willingness to stop things, the panel suggested, may matter more than any willingness to start them.
6. What we're taking away
If the BIC Conference had a common thread, it was a reassuring one for the companies we work with: the winners of the next phase won't necessarily be those with the most advanced models. They'll be the ones who get the human side right – clean data, clear guidelines, a culture that makes adoption safe, and the courage to stop what isn't working.
That's exactly the muscle our InnovationCamp programs are built to strengthen. If you'd like to know how, specifically, we help German companies translate Silicon Valley experience into practical change at home – get in touch!