With about 3,000 members, our internal AI community offers a marketplace to exchange ideas, to network and to collaborate. New communities also offer space for subject-specific topics. Made for experts and those on their way to become one.
In 2018, the internal AI community was created in the "Mercedes-Benz Social Intranet". The aim was and is that AI experts and interested parties can get to know each other within the Mercedes-Benz Group, exchange ideas and discuss technical questions. About 3.000 active members have a platform here on which they can find out which initiatives are currently underway, which internal specialist training and further education opportunities are offered, or which events, such as meetups or events are planned. For AI enthusiasts, the community is thus one of the first port of call.
Beginners also benefit from this: For example, the so-called "KI Starter Kit", a video tutorial with several short spots, explains the basic functioning of machine learning and the use of technology in the Group. The active AI-community is also a very good source to get feedback from the experts in the form of surveys. These results are used, among other things, for the targeted further development of the internal IT strategy.
The Community also organizes meetings, these days more virtual meetings, run by and for interested parties. Many Mercedes-Benz locations around the world offer "AI get-togethers", where ideas and best practices for ongoing projects in all of our divisions can be discussed.
The AI Community of Practice, additionally created by AI-experts in 2018, brings all of Mercedes-Benz Group`s IT units together. Employees working on AI technologies throughout the Group regularly exchange best practices, use cases and trends, as well as current methods and strategies. Each appointment has a pre-defined focus and is always prepared by other members of the community. Here, the self-organized group deepens the content of selected topics and further expands the professional network throughout the company. Through the commitment of all participants, exciting and varied meetings take place.
In addition to the AI community, individual focus topics, such as machine language processing, also have their own "Mercedes-Benz Social Intranet" communities. The NLP (Natural Language Processing) community brings together experts and use cases and enables professional exchange across organizational units. Impulses from external partners (e.g. universities, start-ups) play a very important role. In virtual Meet-ups, colleagues keep up to date on different areas of application: from prominent products such as Hey-Mercedes to the use of methods such as transfer learning and pretrained language models for the classification of customer requests or for text mining.