10 January 2022

Using AI to increase economic crisis resilience

DATEV participates in exploring a new approach for developing an early warning system.

To improve the crisis management of German economy – this is the objective of the three-year research project “Cognitive Economy Intelligence Plattform für die Resilienz wirtschaftlicher Ökosysteme” (cognitive economy intelligence platform for resilience of economic ecosystems), CoyPu for short. Project partners from research and industry will set up a crisis alert system, based on modern semantic data technology and hybrid artificial intelligence (AI) methods. It will be designed to detect first signs of an upcoming crisis in real-time and provide an indication immediately. DATEV eG is part of this initiative, sponsored by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. DATEV is responsible for a sub-project which shall enable the system to import and analyze company data and context information from German enterprises.

For this purpose, DATEV’s research team determines how publicly accessible data – concerning e. g. insolvencies, value-added chains, demography, and news – can be edited, defined, pre-processed and combined with input from project partners as well business information. On this basis, the project consortium explores AI analysis mechanisms and develops user interfaces through which persons affected by a crisis can be supported by policy or tax consultancy, directly or indirectly. For a user focused development several tax consultancies are involved via DITAX AG.

Important piece of a comprehensive system

With its sub-project DATEV supplements the research of the other project partners. This generates an entire system detecting crises and their effects on the economy as well as policy early, giving recommendations how to cope at best. The CoyPu partners will build an AI based platform which will manage integration, structuring, interconnection, analysis, and valuation of data coming from different economic value-added networks and social context. From this, highly qualified and up-to-date knowledge of economic facts, trends, interdependences as well as forecasts for different regions, branches, and enterprise sizes as well as macroeconomic levels will automatically be deduced.

Using this data pool the new system is supposed to support companies, tax consultancies, public administration institutions, policy, and organizations as well as the research community in all forms of crisis which night have massive effects for domains, branches, and even economies. It is also supposed to warn single enterprises at an early stage if a crisis becomes apparent from their individual constellation.

The CoyPu project originated from the innovation contest „Künstliche Intelligenz als Treiber für volkswirtschaftlich relevante Ökosysteme“ (artificial intelligence as driving force for economically relevant ecosystems) and is sponsored by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action with 10 million euros. Participants are – besides DATEV – 20 enterprises and research institutes, among those Institut für Angewandte Informatik e.V., Infineon Technologies AG, Siemens AG, Implisense GmbH and Deutsche Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung e.V.

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