The initiative analyzed around 1,000 startups for the map, which appears annually. In comparison to 2019, an additional 54 new companies were added, while 21 were no longer active or no longer using the technology. A glance at the map shows that the industry is leading the way. Startups with a B2B focus also predominate. The regional distribution of AI startups is interesting: by far the most are based in Berlin and Munich. What is surprising is that IT and cyber security are only a focus for a few of the companies. A reason for this suggested by the authors is that many large businesses in strategically sensitive areas prefer to work with more established companies.

However, there are also some innovations in this area. Computer scientists from the University of Texas have turned the tables on cyber attacks: they lured attackers to a bait website and applied algorithms to the website to discover the hackers’ strategies. This knowledge allowed them to train their own systems to recognize and block the attacks.