AISERA’s intention (creative intelligence platform for businesses, based in Palo Alto, California) to double its staff in Greece over the next year and a half, announced the company’s IT director Vassilis Vassalos during a discussion at a summer school on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, hosted at Anatolia College (ACT – American College of Thessaloniki), in Thessaloniki.

“Among posterity 18 months we plan to double the size of our office in Greece, we actually do not manage to hire staff as quickly as we would like”, he said, adding that AISERA, founded in 2017, has been present in Greece for six years, where it opened its first office after the one in Palo Alto in Silicon Valley. “There is a lot of talent in the Mediterranean and investments in the region will continue and increase” he added, noting that AISERA, which in addition to the USA and Greece still has offices in Canada and India, currently employs 270 workers, of which approx. 45 in our country (mainly in Athens, but not only since the human talent in the company works remotely). Mr. Vassalos also pointed out that Greek startups, which deal with new digital technologies, should place more emphasis on research and investment around so-called “deep tech”, a field with great potential, but in which today mainly only large companies are placed in Greece.

AEGEAN is already enjoying significant benefits from the use of AI in its processes, having managed, among other things, to increase its customers’ response to its offers by 40%, as pointed out by the airline’s CEO, Dimitris Gerogiannis.

For the company, the training of human capital on the capabilities of IT it already started ten years ago and the use of related tools acquired more specific characteristics five years ago, with the creation of the group initially named “AAA” (Aegean Advanced Analytics Team) and later “DSL” (Data Science Lab). Among other things, algorithms are used in the company’s commercial department, to create better promotions and offers, based on the profile of its customers, but also in the pricing strategy and in preventive maintenance procedures (eg, to change aircraft tires at non-peak hours the commercial operation of flights is affected). Mr. Gerogiannis however pointed out that despite the obvious benefits of AI, it is only a tool at the service of man and that no tool solves problems by itself – human intelligence and intelligence are always needed. The CEO of Aegean also made a special mention of the city of Thessaloniki, pointing out its dynamics in the educational and academic field and expressing the belief that it has the prospect of developing into an educational hub in the wider region.

In Google’s DNA, which uses it to organize the huge amount of information it collects, is Artificial Intelligence, as pointed out by Katerina Tzouvara, Gen AI & Customer Engineer Public Sector Ambassador of Google Greece, while Thanos Stavropoulos, Technology & Innovation Senior Manager of the Center of Digital Innovation (CDI) of Pfizer, expressed the belief that the presence of the hub of the pharmaceutical industry in the city had a significant impact on the way research and innovation is developed in Greece. Federico Neri, Director of IT at Deloitte Italy, underlined the importance of IT in terms of developing innovative solutions, which are necessary in the management of texts, but also in the recognition of emotions such as irony and sarcasm in the written word. The panel discussion was moderated by dr. Giannis Assael of Google DeepMind.

180 people from different countries are participating in the Summer School for Artificial Intelligence in ACT – during six days, from August 28 to September 2. It is an organization of the non-profit organization AI Education Foundation, supported by Google DeepMind, ACT, Aegean Airlines, Deloitte (Deloitte Competence Center), Pfizer (CDI), AISERA and Reply and the Department of Informatics of AUTh . The summer school is open to Masters and PhD students, academics and professionals from all over the world (including Germany, Greece, USA, UK, India, Iran, Spain, Italy, Canada, China, Morocco, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Netherlands, Tunisia ), with an emphasis on the Mediterranean region.