“Starting a business in 24 hours” – Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger’s appearance at the AI ​​Festival

Digital Minister Wildberger wants to reduce bureaucracy, accelerate startups, and attract more startups to government projects. He reveals how at the AI ​​Festival in Berlin-Mitte.

Under the motto "Bing Bang," what claims to be Europe's largest AI festival will take place on September 10 and 11 in Berlin-Mitte. Fittingly for the Big Bang, the various stages are named Pluto, Mars, Earth, and Jupiter. Karsten Wildberger, Germany's first digital minister, who, like other ministers, is also responsible for startups , will perform on the latter at lunchtime.

The Jupiter Hall is packed to capacity. The air is still and hot. The audience is wondering how the air conditioning could be so bad at a technology festival.

In his short speech, Wildberger makes it clear: Germany must accelerate in the AI ​​race. The Digital Minister sees artificial intelligence as the "switch we need to flip in our heads" to promote Germany's young talent. His goal is clear: "Wouldn't it be nice if in three years we had four times as many AI startups as we do today?"

Shortly thereafter, Wildberger announces a digitization project, which has been widely discussed in the past, that will make it possible to start a business digitally in Germany within 24 hours. Initial pilot projects are already underway, including in Schleswig-Holstein. A short but emphatic "Yippee!" erupts from the otherwise quiet audience. The moderator critically notes that this has been possible in other European countries ( Estonia, for example ) for years. What's the problem in Germany?

According to Wildberger, the reason this hasn't worked in this country so far is the federal structures and complicated bureaucracy. He criticizes the fact that there are around 6,000 different process variants in 11,000 municipalities. This is not federalism, but "uncontrolled growth."

In addition to accelerating startup startups, Wildberger—also a well-known project—intends to involve startups more closely in government digitalization projects in the future: "Starting in October, we will launch concrete projects to digitize administrative services using artificial intelligence. We want to specifically invite startups to contribute their solutions, for example, with language models, rule sets, or agentic AI."

Last but not least, Wildberger emphasizes that the federal government is pursuing a clear strategy for digital sovereignty: European cloud solutions and open-source AI are to be specifically promoted. "The federal government is adjusting its tenders and will soon launch two cloud projects that will also include strong European providers," Wildberger said. He continued: "The state will be a key customer in these projects. These projects will be implemented in October."

There's also a bit of encouragement. Wildberger emphasizes that the goal now is to create "freedom for startups"—with less bureaucracy and more access to administration, in order to unleash Germany's innovative power.