appliedAI Initiative
The appliedAI Initiative is a Munich company that helps businesses bring artificial intelligence from first use cases into daily production. Andreas Liebl founded it in 2017 at UnternehmerTUM, the Munich center for innovation and business creation, and since 2022 it has been a joint venture of UnternehmerTUM and the Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence (IPAI) in Heilbronn.
More than 100 AI experts work at appliedAI, which has advised over 250 companies, among them 23 of the 40 DAX corporations. The offer runs from AI strategy and governance under EU rules to the development of generative AI and AI agents, plus training for employees. A non-profit subsidiary, the appliedAI Institute for Europe, adds free courses, applied research and hackathons.
Founder, UnternehmerTUM and IPAI
Andreas Liebl founded appliedAI in 2017 within UnternehmerTUM and still leads the company as managing director and founder. In 2022 appliedAI became a joint venture of UnternehmerTUM and IPAI, the Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence in Heilbronn. The legal entity behind the brand is appliedAI Initiative GmbH, which has its headquarters in Munich and a second office in Heilbronn.
The management team around Andreas Liebl includes Philipp Hartmann as director of AI strategy and enablement and Siegmund Düll as director of AI transformation and implementation. Rade Milinkovic is director of finance, and Diana Stracke is director of people and IT.
Consulting, programs and AI training
The consulting work of appliedAI covers AI strategy, operating models and governance, and its engineers build applications with generative AI, AI agents and MLOps through to production. The company counts more than 70 AI applications brought into production and is certified under ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO 9001.
Two programs have a fixed format: the AI Agent Lighthouse Program is a twelve-week program on multi-agent systems, and the AI Accelerator for small and medium-sized companies runs for six months. Under the heading AI enablement, appliedAI trains staff and managers, from courses on the risk classes of the EU AI Act to the AI Heroes training program at the chip maker Infineon.
Partners and the Companion Partnership
Companies that work with appliedAI over a longer period join the Companion Partnership, a program for firms that have moved past their first pilots. Partners get a maturity assessment with a twelve-month roadmap, quarterly workshops and technical feedback on architecture and code. They also take part in working groups on AI governance, the EU AI Act and AgentOps, and in roundtables in Munich on subjects such as security architecture for enterprise AI.
On the technology side, appliedAI has announced partnerships with NVIDIA, SAP, deepset and AMD Silo AI, and it cooperates with the Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML) on research.
Upcoming fintech and finance events in Germany
The appliedAI Institute for Europe
The appliedAI Institute for Europe gGmbH is a non-profit subsidiary of appliedAI Initiative GmbH, supported by the IPAI Foundation, with locations in Heilbronn and Munich. The institute works with public institutions, businesses and civil society to put trustworthy AI into practice through applied research, open resources and training. Its offer includes free online courses, workshops, hackathons and open source tools.
Training has been part of the initiative from the start, and by late 2022 appliedAI had trained more than 40,000 people in AI. Its free offers at the time included online AI courses, an AI maturity assessment, a library of use cases and an annual map of German AI startups.
EU AI Act and risk classification
In March 2023 appliedAI published a study on the risk classification of AI systems under the draft EU AI Act, based on enterprise applications. Of the systems examined, 18 percent fell into the high-risk class and 42 percent into the low-risk class, while for 40 percent the classification stayed unclear. According to the study, such unclear cases slow down investment and innovation in companies that want to use AI.
For banks and insurers the question is concrete, because the EU AI Act classes the credit scoring of natural persons and risk pricing in life and health insurance as high-risk uses. appliedAI also offers a use case management tool for the requirements of the regulation, with which a company records its AI systems and their risk classes.
Address in Munich
The headquarters of appliedAI is at August-Everding-Straße 25 in 81671 Munich, and the second office is in Heilbronn, where IPAI is located. Partner roundtables take place in Munich, for example at the House of Communication on Friedenstraße, and working groups present their results online.
appliedAI Initiative and Finance Loop
Finance Loop members at banks, insurers and asset managers face the questions that appliedAI works on with industrial companies: which AI systems fall under the high-risk rules of the EU AI Act, and how a model moves from a pilot into production. Finance Loop discusses these questions at its events on AI in finance, from AI governance to AI agents in banking.
Finance Loop is a professional network and has the goal of driving the institutional use of emerging technologies in finance, such as AI, tokenization, stablecoins, and DeFi. Finance Loop helps its members build skills and personal networks in these fields: Investment & Digital Assets, Payments & Digital Money, Digital Infrastructure & Sovereignty, and Risk & Compliance.