 Hi, so I'm Muneer, I'm the Junior Minister for Digital in France. I just wanted before starting to talk with you about artificial intelligence, to know you a little more. Who are the entrepreneurs here in the room? I've been one, so I can reach my hand as well. Who are the policy makers? Not enough of them, none of them actually. They should come here to Slash, they would see. What are the others? You are the silent crowd. Well, before coming, I went on Google and see if AI was just a trend or if AI was really something big. And if you look at the number of results on machine learning, you see that it's 300 million research results. It's nearly Rihanna plus Helsinki at the same time. It's 1,000 times Muneer Majoubi. It has never been as high and people are questioning the subject. If you look at the Slash book that was distributed to every member and on the website, nearly 25% of the startups present today said that they were part of the AI environment. Who in this audience would say that is activity as a link with AI? As a state leader, I have this responsibility as well. So the question we have today is how Europe is dealing with AI and how do we make our best to have European giant tackling the question. When we look at the US, we see the GAFA. When we look at China, we see the BATX. When we look at Europe, we see Spotify. So there is a question, there is an issue. We are late, we can say it, but we can also say that we have key elements that can be reassured for us that we will be ready for the future. The first element is that Europe has some of the best researchers on the planet on the subject. One of the elements is that nearly a majority of all AI laboratory everywhere in the world are headed by a European researcher or a European trained researcher. So this is a hope for our region, for our continent to believe that we have the intellectual tools to prepare this future. The other element that reached to our history is that Europe has some of the best public data sets, especially in terms of health. If you look at France, it's nearly 100 million people that we have in a data set for the last 50 years where we know everything from their first diagnosis to the last day of their life. These type of data sets are very rare and they are the monopoly of countries that decided early in our century to centralize and to keep this data about health. This is a hope also for discoveries of new elements. The other element that shouldn't shy us is about EU GDP. To compare the EU GDP to US GDP or Chinese GDP, we see that we have the power to invest. We have the ability to invest. Do we invest yet enough in AI and digital? The answer is no. Do we have the capacity? The answer is massively yes. So politics and election is all about persuasion, but government is about execution. So the question is what do we have now for the coming months to go forward to a European vision and a European strategy on AI? The first element is to build an EU vision of what should be the AI ecosystem of Europe. Do we see an AI system with European value or do we follow AI research or AI applications that has been decided, that has been built, that has been sought from other continents? What I believe is that Europe has been built on diversity and what lacks to AI now and today is diversity. Diversity of people will bring diversity of goals, will bring diversity of success in terms of AI application, but it will also unbiased artificial intelligence. It will unbiased the data set that will be used to train this artificial intelligence system. And I think that there is a view, a European view, even a French view of how we should do this accomplishment of diversity. In France we've launched the French Tech Diversity Program just to be sure that in our tech ecosystem we do have enough women and this is mainly one of the biggest questions we have right now in terms of HR in artificial intelligence having nearly 100% of the entrepreneurs and researchers being men on this subject and diversity of social background that also gives new ways to find problems on which we want to find solutions. The other element to see the European way is about control, but not just control to limit but control to identify risk. Control to build a future without access. Control that would help us to anticipate ethical questions. What would be the worst thing is that we will not achieve the AI goals because the people won't like or wouldn't want to use them. Last week I unveiled a survey where 69% of French citizens said that during the last year they decided to not use a digital service because they were scared. Because they were scared for their privacy, because they were scared for their data. The worst thing that could happen to the French AI market, to the French AI ecosystem is to have 69% of the population that don't want to use it because they would be scared of it. So there is an issue and there is a role of the government here to have the citizens, even the one with the least digital skills to understand what we are doing right now in terms of AI. So once we've built this vision we have to find key elements to put them in place. The first one is to make Europe one digital single market. We are talking about it for 10 years yet, but it's still not a reality. Europe, if the digital market was a reality, is a 500 million citizen market. 500 million people sharing the same digital and legal framework. It's becoming more and more a reality, but it's not yet accomplished. And we need, and that's the discussion we'll have on Monday at the Digital Council of Europe, where all the ministers of digital from all countries will decide how we want to accelerate on this subject. This is one of the key elements if we want champions coming from France, coming from Europe, and not champions of Europe becoming champions in other continents because it wasn't possible here. The second key element of success is to bridge the digital skills gap. And this digital skills gap is at every level. We need high level experts and we know how to produce more. We know how to invest in universities. We know how to invest in research to have more researchers going out of university every year. But this is not the main challenge. The main challenge is basic digital skills. We identified that in France, only in France, certain millions of French people don't know how to use digital interfaces. Certain million people don't know how to use public services online. Certain million people don't know how to use e-commerce, don't you? How to use social networks. These certain million people, if you talk too much and too loud about artificial intelligence without investing in their skills, they would do everything to stop the evolution of artificial intelligence. So we need to tackle this issue of digital skills for all citizens from basic digital skills to high level skills. The third element of success is to build and create an equal playground for all digital actors. And it's specifically a question vis-a-vis large international platforms and especially American ones. If we think about taxation, if you think about privacy, if you think about data usage, then you see that local European actors are not playing with the same rules as the others. If we want to emerge and make European companies being able to deliver new services, then we have to find an equal playground for everyone. On this subject, you know that 2018 will be a very important year with the RGPD, a regulation at the EU level that will be applicable in every country beginning May 2018 that will regulate data privacy and make every company accountable for the treatment of the data they have on each citizens in the EU. This sounds very technical, but it might become the beginning of a revolution. It will create possibilities for new European actors to create new competitive advantages based on the respect of privacy, based on the respect of data protection. And I'm sure that might help us a lot on the subject of AI where data is one of the key transformation elements. In AI and in other technologies, we also have to invest public money. And when we talk about public money, we are talking about billions of euros of public money. But this public money shouldn't be alone. Public money invested in these innovations should be a leverage for private money to invest. The thinking of the EU Commission right now, the thinking of the French, of the EU countries is to build an ecosystem of finance where public money is helped, where the private sector wouldn't invest by itself because of the high level of risk of these technologies. We truly believe in that and France has already invested multiple billions of euros in multi-colonial funds to help develop these strategies. So the question is, will it be enough or no? We don't know. Will we be the champions? I don't know. But are we creating the whole context to make it possible? I believe so. I believe that the Commission is on the right way. I believe that we have some European champion countries that are doing the best to make it happen. And I'm sure that we have the capacity in Europe with the people and with the knowledge of our people to tackle this defeat. So thank you very much. And let's together make this possible. Thank you.