AI

Czechia is one of the best European destinations for investments, where talent, level of education and innovativeness create suitable conditions for the growth of technology. All these externalities have enabled Czech companies such as Avast, for example, to grow while attracting a strong inflow of projects with high value added from leading global tech companies. It’s not surprising that Czechia is still, even today, one of the countries where Google has a strong local competitor, in this case Seznam. cz, which for more than three decades has been making localised products that challenge//compete with those of Google. No other country where the Latin alphabet is used has such a local champion.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming to the forefront and Czechia is a remarkably strong and significant AI hotspot, especially when taking into account the country’s size and its concentration of AI researchers, skills and talent. It’s no wonder that many companies have their AI research teams and activities in Czechia and collaborate with world-class researches at local universities. And it’s definitely no surprise that there are numerous innovative AI startups with global reach and international recognition. Companies like Resistant.ai and Rossum.ai have attracted significant investments in recent years and may soon be joined by others. CzechInvest is keeping step in this area, as AI is one of the main technologies that the agency supports within its AI HUB, while its Technology Incubation (TI) project is an effective tool for supporting startups. AI was the most prominent field in the first call of the TI project, when 35% of applicants referred to themselves as AI startups. The first twelve startups are being incubated in 2023 and many other are expected to follow in the coming years.

New trends and technical advancements, such as challenges in AI, are actively support- ed by numerous programmes, national strategies, outstanding research centres and universities. The noteworthy regional entities prg.ai and have assembled and actively participated in local AI ecosystems that have universities at their core. Academics and researchers are successfully coordinated within AI Czechia, an initiative that brings together AI researchers with an objective similar to that of CzechInvest, prg.ai and brno. ai, i.e., to make Czechia an outstanding location for AI innovation with global reach. Prague and Brno are the biggest hotspots for AI research in Czechia and the home of more than 80% of all AI companies and researchers. All of the companies supported within the first call of CzechInvest’s Technology Incubation project were from these regional hubs. If you are an active user of AI or if AI is at the very core of your product, it’s worth taking note of AI Days, an annual week-long event that offers the opportunity to approach the local AI community. The first edition of AI Days, which was held in Brno in 2022, was rated as a major success, and it is anticipated that future editions will take place in other regions of the country.

A recent survey of the Prague AI scene carried out by prg.ai in 2022 (downloadable from prg.ai) indicates that a typical AI company is up to five years old, while 80% of such companies have smaller AI teams of fewer than ten people. At CzechInvest, we believe there is huge potential in AI that is yet to be discovered, as Czechia has world-class researchers in NLP and machine perception, among other areas, and more of the country’s world- class startups will provide their services around the globe in the years to come.