Say goodbye to traffic jams with AI (ep26)
Nemanja: This is Chair, a place where we discuss innovations. Today we have a guest with a strong belief that everything we produce with our creative mind has to ensure the quality of life. For example, imagine travelling from one part of the city to another in no time, thanks to AI. Our guest Udo Eichlinger is on the verge of such a breakthrough. Udo is CEO at Siemens Serbia, Siemens Mobility and he is the president of the German-Serbian Chamber of Commerce. Apart from being a successful leader and business innovator, in a company that is more than 130 years old, he’s a people person. Udo, welcome to Chair. It’s a pleasure to have you here today.
Udo: Thank you for having me.
Nemanja: We are going to talk about innovations, especially in terms of traffic. But first, I want to ask you, and I think you’re the great guy to ask you this question, what is the key to becoming a great leader?
Udo: I think that that’s really a multi-multi view necessary a bit on that. I think you’re not a natural-born leader. I think through expertise, that you have from your business point, from your studies, or from a business you went through. You are taking away some elements out of that. Additionally, you need to be, from my point of view, a good listener. You need to listen to people. You have to have empathy for people to understand their needs and their demands. Listening, I think, is a very prominent element in that. To anticipate what would be the next step and what would be the rationale to go forward with a client or with a colleague. That could be a kind of foundation. So, on one side the competencies you have been gaining throughout many years and on the other side the experience you have made in various situations with your colleagues. You always took something out. I think experience is a very important element in that as well. To be a good leader means also to pull people and not to push people.
We can’t stand in front of people and say: “Okay you go now in that direction five thousand meters and people will just blindly turn around and run five thousand meters”. That doesn’t work anymore. If I’m saying maybe, “Look guys, I think it’s beneficial to run 5000 meters with me and let me start in the front. “Please come with me”, something like that. That makes you at least the kind of person who is under today’s understanding of management and leadership. A person who could become a leader. Another element, and with that maybe I’m closing the answer to that question, is that you have to find a way to influence and how to win people. To get the buy-in of people. To create a growth mindset, that everything is possible, that there are no limits in business. That there is a kind of spirit inside of people to create a motivation they already have. To sharpen that motivation and to bring people behind an idea and a high value and high-performance culture. Only if you have that implemented can you win and get to heights higher than ever planned. That still doesn’t make you a good leader. I think that a mix of that and situational intelligence and emotional intelligence is a very profound element you have to have too. And, that all around the circle, that makes you a good leader and there are not so many of them, I would say.
N: Follow up on this. You mentioned a growth mindset and I want to touch a bit with the cultural stuff. You’re from Germany and you’re nowhere in Serbia for more than five years. We can see that you’re a great leader throughout your career and what you accomplished. Was it hard to work with a different mentality?
U: Look, first and foremost I think you need to prepare for a task. That is one thing. So. companies who send people somewhere in a different cultural environment. Name it, is it Asia, is it the Asia Pacific or is it the Far East or the Middle East or is it Central Eastern Europe? You need to know that you have to prepare your people for that cultural environment. Did it happen in my case? No! Not at all. But the thing is you have to have a kind of open mindset for a change. If you’re not open to change you wouldn’t even change a country. You would stay in secure Germany, you would not be willing to move with your pack of the family from one place to another. Putting them into uncertainty. So I think you need a kind of a basic willingness to change. Really to enjoy change. To enjoy uncertainty and to go actively for that. I remember one story when we went to China. The whole family went to China. I needed a telephone, a fixed phone at home. If you have a rental contract you need a fixed phone there. And I didn’t even know what to do because I could not read the language, I could not see the signs. So I had to ask myself through. It took me I think one and a half weeks with some support even from some people to get through this. When I finally had my phone it was not even making any… So I still had to activate it. So different countries, different cultures, different challenges and you have to love that otherwise you would not do that constantly. To jump from one duty to another. The experience out of that, not the telephone story, but the experience of many countries gives you a wide range of situations you pass through and you find many similarities even… in some things. But every country is very much specific.
N: Yes, specific cultures, specific needs. Let’s move to our subject and it’s very interesting. Since Siemens as a company is working throughout the world with different huge cities. The problems that you are solving, one of them is around the transport and the transportation system. Before we tap into that I wanna hear your perspective of where Belgrade stands with innovation? What is your vision for this growing metropolis?
U: Everything that we do actually is innovation. I think that Siemens stands, really, for innovation. You have mentioned 135 years and in these 135 years, I would say, we did really groundbreaking things. However, nothing is as old as the success of yesterday.
N: Exactly.
U: But we took so much expertise out of different kinds of verticals, different kinds of industries into our DNA that innovation became a part of our DNA. Having known that, in 2018 Siemens applied daily 33 patents per day with the European patent authorities. This means this is a significant amount of new inventions and innovations per day. Siemens is one of the leading companies in that, ever since.
N: That’s like 10 000 a year, something like that.
U: Even we don’t know, as colleagues, we don’t know what Siemens actually knows. You have to embrace this culture of forming people to think out of the box. To innovate! It comes from innovation, right? So you need to innovate an existing element of life to make it a scalable business at the end of the day, which has a certain impact also on society. Back to your question about where we stand in Belgrade. I would say that if you drive through Belgrade you have many things improving. Is that the government, e-government, for example? And I think a good example is this management of the Covid crisis. This application for vaccination you can get and all this stuff. This process is really working.
N: Yes, it’s remarkable.
U: It’s remarkably working and it’s working way better than in my home country actually.
N: Can you actually say that?
U: Yes I guess I said that. Because really I need to say, many countries are far more in that kind of development of digitalization. But coming back to Belgrade, if you pass through Belgrade there’s a lot of news, there’s a lot of new buildings. A lot of new services, there are a lot of new things for citizens to attract them and to make their life easier. That’s one thing and then the government actually does, for my perception, a pretty good job compared to other cities. When it comes to real business and real practical things we still have congestion in traffic jams. We have terrible commuting times. We have pollution in the city which makes me decide against this city to live in. I’m living on the other side of the river. Actually, I would love to live in the old town. I love old towns, it’s really wonderful. If the congestion and the pollution would be less, I think it would attract more people to come to the city. From my point of view, a rich country is not a country where poor people are driving cars. The rich country is where the rich guys are commuting with public transportation.
N: Exactly.
U: If you look at Switzerland many people commute there having a significant amount of money but using that like a relaxed time in the morning to read the newspaper and still commute from A to B. In that status, we have to achieve in Belgrade as well. There are enough programs initiated and many good steps forward initiated. Concretely what we are doing for the city of Belgrade is that if you commute for instance from Pancevo to New Belgrade you could go to the Zemun bridge. But imagine you don’t have this bridge anymore, you would go through the whole city in the morning in the traffic jams and when it’s raining then you know what is happening in Belgrade. You need at least an hour from Pancevo towards Belgrade.
N: On a lucky day!
U: Yes, on a lucky day. Even no rain, even sunshine. No, but indeed we are reducing with innovation, with one of the utmost modern traffic management systems. Which is state-of-the-art applied in this region and even on an international basis.
With artificial intelligence based on algorithms to find the best switching, the best phases, how to root the amount of traffic in that very moment throughout the city. Drastically reducing commuting times.
Drastically reducing congestion because the engines are running less through the city. And of course, it reduces the stress levels of the citizens. You have fewer people getting sick. Everything is impacting this system. It is literally impacting society. If you see the macroeconomic harm of a traffic jam that is really significant. This is perfectly addressed together with the city and the experts of the secretary for traffic, with our expert. Where we are working out what is the best for the city. The tram priority, the VIP priority. To switch, to have the phases shorter. And you will see if you go regularly through the city, stop the time you are on Kralja Aleksandra street. You will see how you have it the next day or the week after. It will always be a different kind of waiting time you have. Because traffic is really adopted by artificial intelligence and by so-called motion zones. That’s where we are with innovation in that particular thing and you have it of course also in the field of medical and health care where we’re significantly improving. Also on the, let’s say medical side, doctor side. Where they have to make it now in Covid times, 20–30 appointments per day.
Where they have to diagnose patients precisely in a short amount of time and you can do that with artificial intelligence in a blink of a second. Keeping doctors on the treatment side of the patients. So, what is important in that process is that the patient feels very well. Right?
That the patient is treated in a good way. That the patient is fast out, that he is not spending too much time waiting and all this stuff. That is important for society. So if you can have a machine doing that job more precisely faster cheaper you can utilize your doctors. The important part from my point of view, you can shift them to exactly that part and that is changing our life drastically in the coming years.
N: You mentioned earlier several patents that you, as a company, did in the European Union in 2018. It’s an incredible number. Based on that info, how do you make a decision in which direction to innovate?
U: Well, generally there is, of course, a lot of organisms like Siemens you have, of course, people sitting on central technology for example. They see megatrends in the world. They see in which area we have existing issues and those people and not only those people also, many many people on the planet are thinking about disruptions of things which are existing today and how to do it in a smarter, in a faster, and more efficient way. So that leads to the situation that companies, suddenly, are producing dust cleaners today and tomorrow, with the artificial intelligence and the elements of industry 4.0, they are suddenly producing cars, e-cars!
So, for example, one example of how you can make an impact with such a technology is Solomon company. They’re producing shoes, sports shoes, even for armies and for outdoors and so on. Such shoes are produced in one minute today! From the beginning to the finished product in one minute! So reducing drastically the time of production, this is one thing, but also the pre-production phase is cut to a fraction of the time we used to do the r`n`d and the development of the products. So with modern means of technology and modern instruments and tools of technology, today, where our kids, where our grandkids will work with and even we are working with already, that will change our whole life cycle, our whole product life cycle and of course also the way how we bring products to a market.
Yeah, I think we have even also in Adidas, right? We have those partnerships with Adidas. You can produce a sneaker today within minutes according to your needs and you click and configure it on the internet and you click send and the sneaker falls out in three minutes in line with the production of Adidas. So everything, this process is very much shortened, right? So the middle man and the middle people involved in this process are not existing anymore. So also that is a huge change.
N: It’s an interesting story about the shoes, but as somebody who’s driving in Belgrade, I want to go back to the traffic question and ask you additionally, what, at this point, are your biggest challenges in implementing this AI traffic operator system?
U: We look of utmost importance, of course, that you’re not hindering the traffic to flow, right. So you need to really align all kinds of activities on the street. You have to make sure that it’s safe for the people, safe for our staff, safe for the secondary traffic, for the people who are really working on the ground you’re operating on an open heart actually. So you have of course some process in place, how you agree with the secretary, and the police are engaged. All these kinds of things are somehow necessary for buying time, buying certain time. So in the beginning it took a bit longer and now we have already implemented, I think a 90 crossroads in Belgrade, 9–0 crossroads. So for one year, we are now running already in this mode and we are faster and faster and faster. So altogether we have 320 something crossroads in this process or this project. If you ask me what the biggest challenge is, you have to educate and inform citizens about the change, why we are doing this.
There might be even a small traffic jam, right? Because we are hanging these new lanterns which is a one-watt solution. For example, for the time being, it was a 30 or 40-Watt solution per one traffic light and you have thousands and thousands of this in the city and now it has just one watt, with one Watt you are saving electricity. So this trend goes more into sustainable things and the challenge is also to educate the people. “Listen guys if there is a longer waiting time it has a reason for that short period of time why you have that because then it goes way faster after that”, right? So to educate the people or to inform the people not to get impatient because such innovation also leads to a certain adoption time, right? You need to adapt in a way to new technologies and I would say the main hurdle sometimes is that people are more and more impatient, right? So I don’t want to wait with a doctor. I don’t want to wait in the traffic. For me it’s stressful. I have the next appointment then and then and if I cannot reach it I’m getting angry. It’s a humankind of thing and that might even stand, very often, in the way of innovation as well: “Oh, I don’t want this change because it is you know…. I don’t need a smartphone” and stuff like that. Everybody has it today and it’s a completely new way of being completely new. It’s 15 years 20 years an element of our daily use and we are ordering our food, we are communicating with our partners, we are finding our partners even on the internet. Who would have thought that you would have matchmakers on the internet 15 years ago? And now it’s completely normal to find a partner on “Tinder” or other platforms, yeah. So that stand is not important to me, and I would never do it, however, you know our kids and grandkids are getting used to it, they are digital natives, so I think our brain capacity and our willingness to change is very often the issue. We did that 20 years in the same way so why change now? I think our own habits are sometimes the element of blocking things…
N: We talked about this and what are you doing with the traffic, but what are the improvements, what’s next?
U: You mean, how it comes to the decisions of such an investment which is significant right? Look, there needs to be a strategy in place right? So every city needs to have a plan, a budget process of course. This year we have to invest in public transportation, we need to buy buses, trams, whatever, trolleybuses, and so on and so on. But if you see how it’s literally done in the means of the Siemens way, it means that we developed a platform actually, service as a platform for cities which is used by many, many international cities like Copenhagen, Paris, Vienna, Munich, I think… Belgrade actually…
N: So we’re in good company!
U: Yes, honestly speaking, this solution which we donated to the city of Belgrade for some period of time to use, allows you as a city to implement or to put in your plant investments, and to benchmark those different kinds of investments against each other in means of the outcome. So if you invest in a metro project, it has different outcomes in means of employment, in means of co2 reduction, in means of life quality in the city, then for instance if you invest into buses, okay? And how do you decide, for example, am I investing now into new trams or investing now more into more trolleybuses, or new bus lines…
N: …or the new bridge…
U: …or the metro… or new bridge! And so on and so on. So this software is based also on certain algorithms, and many, many data from other cities benchmark. The city of Belgrade has the chance in benchmarking its possible investments against other cities and to see the impact in co2 reduction and the increase of life quality and jobs created with this investment. The city of Belgrade can actually derive a strategy out of that. What I was talking about. So you need a strategy to manage a city, and if I was the decision-maker in the city of Belgrade, which, luckily, I’m not because it’s a very responsible job, however, my target would be to create the city of the future. By really coming back to that phrase a rich country is not where the poor are driving cars. The rich country is where the rich use public transportation. I would literally invest a lot in this kind of area. Now, I’m not a specialist for metros or other means of commuting in this particular city, because every city has its specific needs. However, I think that we can advise and that our advisors are heard by the city, and that is a good thing, right? So there are many voices in the market, but if there is an advisory voice as well, you can do A, B or C and this is the impact out of that, then you know whom to listen to.
N: I always like to finish the episode with future questions. But let’s go with a twist. We talked about AI, how you’re using AI and leveraging the traffic issues. And now you told me this example of how you’re using it to get much bigger insights into the cities and how they’re doing and what they should do. But what is your opinion on the negative aspects of AI?
U: Okay, this is in a way the eternal question of machine versus humankind.
N: We are going a bit into the realm of philosophy…
U: What was that movie about, um… yeah Terminator! Okay yeah, it’s Terminator. Look how artificial intelligence is a plus for us. Giving us advantages, for humankind in terms of medicine, in all kinds of areas, improvement of our situations. And how far can artificial intelligence become a threat to humankind? And indeed that is an absolutely valid question. Artificial intelligence can be extremely dangerous, because it’s self-learning, self-multiplying, self-sustaining system, so you don’t necessarily have it under control, right? So you cannot just say — okay I’m using the positive element and forgetting the negative elements. If you once start that, you are in a process, you absolutely cannot stop anymore. So we are dealing with artificial intelligence if we really choose wisely what is the area where we are addressing the problems of humankind. Hunger in the world, how to cultivate things, how to avoid wars, how to make a product better, faster, cheaper and more affordable. Not just push it out into the market and throw it away in two years as a consumer. So we should adapt our need for consumption — not to buy everything that we might think we need, but to get a condensed opinion and apply informed decision making on things we would like to achieve with such a technology. Just as every knife can be used to prepare your bread for your child in the morning, and you can stab someone on the street. So normal human beings would not use it for that second thing, but it can be used. And artificial intelligence has that potential as well because it’s not controllable to the full extent. It has way more capacity than human beings ever will develop, so it is something that we will develop possibly. Even resistance to be switched off by someone who is a human being. This resistance we have to analyze and face. That can happen and if we are doing that, responsible use of such a technology is mandatory. And it needs to be decided on a higher level than just a kind of developer’s will. That’s on that. I’m a friend of modern technologies, but responsible use of that technology is absolutely crucial for me.
N: Thank you so much for this conversation, I enjoyed it a lot. And for you out there, subscribe and see you next Thursday when we talk about some innovations.
U: Thank you for having me here.
N: Thank you.
Keep up with us:
