In Switzerland, start-ups find ideal framework conditions and strong partners in the economy who are interested in developing research for artificial intelligence (AI). The AI boom is based on the will to cooperate on the part of research institutions, such as EPFL or ETH, as well as the willingness of corporations to support start-ups with development partnerships.
Another advantage of Switzerland as a location is its modern infrastructure, including key enabler technologies such as cloud, open source, connectivity and real-time networking, political stability, pioneering spirit and willingness to invest, as well as traditional Swiss strengths such as engineering, precision mechanics and mechatronics.
Swisscom publishes a market overview of Swiss start-ups in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) four times a year. According to Swisscom, companies must meet the following five criteria to be included in the startup selection: Founded less than seven years ago, based in Switzerland, focus on disruptive technology or service innovation, focus on AI and a scalable business model. The landscape of the Swiss Artificial Intelligence Startup Map is spread across the following 14 categories: AdTech, Sales & CRM, Agriculture, Business Intelligence, E-commerce, FinTech & InsurTech, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Image Recognition, LegalTech & RegTech, Machine Intelligence, Mobility, Robotics, Security, Speech Recognition, Virtual Assistants/Chatbots.
In addition to Swisscom, the big AI sponsors are various banks, insurers, the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), healthcare providers and cities such as the city of Zurich. Start-ups are accompanied, research is financed and AI technologies are heavily commercialised. Market success brings new things to innovation. Switzerland is an AI pioneer and certainly wants to remain one.
