Last year, the Academy’s expert roundtables – face-to-face discussions with 30 to 50 participants – once again attempted to present the “complete picture” of complex topics relating to the Internet in an in-depth and balanced manner, each lasting six hours with equal representation based on stimulus statements and intensive discussion. The Academy’s 499th Expert Roundtable was held in December 2023, bringing the number of executives who have taken part over the years to over 20,000.

In 2023, the deutsche ict + medienakademie focussed primarily on digital infrastructure. In addition to two expert roundtables on the longer-term “Next Generation Internet” and the shorter-term “Network Future”, the focus was on the relationship between the edge and the cloud: for example, twice with different focal points. Another topic was software-defined networking (SDN), which is increasingly becoming a matter of course in networks. There was naturally also the obligatory outlook on mobile technologies: While 6G was initially considered to have great potential in terms of speed and latency compared to 5G, one expert remarked that, “6G realises what 5G promised”– the discussion contributions on this were now much more restrained. As always, the crowning event of the year was the 28th Broadband Forum, which this time took place in the Camphausen Hall of the Cologne Chamber of Industry and Commerce.

Another block of roundtables focussed on applications such as Smart Energy, the Future of Industry, Robotics, Remote Servicing, the Future Car and the Media.

Intensive and high-level discussions

One example of the intensive and high-level discussion was the roundtable on “Robotics” on 11 May 2023 at Rittal in Haiger: For decades, robots have not only been dull tools of industrial automation, but also exert an emotional fascination on the broad non-specialist world, especially when one knows that the inclined readers think primarily of human-like or dog-like figures made of sheet metal. Even in setting aside these fanciful notions – robotics, whether with or without AI, autonomous or networked, travelling at high speed or more sedately, is a worthwhile object of regular consideration from a technological and economic perspective.

After an introduction by Prof. Felix Hackelöer from TH Köln, experts from two Fraunhofer Institutes presented the latest technologies in this field. One of the highlights, however, was the discussion with robotics experts from Kuka, Beckhoff and Schneider Electric. Nonetheless, on closer inspection, robotics scenarios can be very different: One expert is relying primarily on AI for robots in the future – the combination of ever-improving artificial, possibly cognitive intelligence offers unimagined opportunities to optimise production and logistics and reduce costs. Another is already satisfied when simple, uniform work is done by machines much faster and with better quality than by humans. Incidentally, according to a survey, only around half of German mechanical engineers use robot technology in their company and only a third want to expand this approach further. A sign of the limits of automation?

These individual topics were framed by the discussion of some important framework conditions such as resilience, in particular cybersecurity, but also bots and AI – with a roundtable meeting exclusively on ChatGPT and other generative models (at Birlinghoven Castle on the Fraunhofer campus in Sankt Augustin).

After 23 years of the deutsche ict + medienakademie, including six years under the wing of the eco Association, Internet expertise is now at a high level among managers in Germany. As such, we decided to discontinue the deutsche ict + medienakademie as of 31 December 2023.