Feiyu Xu
AI Strategy Expert, Non-Executive Director at Airbus, Supervisory Board Member of ZF Group
Feiyu Xu has masterfully bridged the gap between research and industry. Starting her career as a computational linguist at Saarland University, Xu has published extensively on diverse topics in natural language processing (NLP) and AI, including Text Mining and Explainable AI. She has been a long-time member – and more recently a fellow, the highest honor – of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). Simultaneously, Xu’s career has spanned leadership roles at global powerhouses like Lenovo, ZF Group, SAP, and Airbus. Notably, she served as SAP’s Senior Vice President and Global Head of Artificial Intelligence and led AI research at Lenovo as Vice President and Head of AI Lab. Xu is also a serial entrepreneur, with her latest startup being nyonic, though she left it in 2024.
“It is very important for Europe’s sovereignty that we have our own AI technology stack.”
“It is very important for Europe's sovereignty that we have our own AI technology stack,” says Xu in an interview with Table Media. Achieving this, she argues, demands investment in several key components that together form the foundation for successful innovation: chips, cloud services, and access to ample data. At the same time, Xu emphasizes that collaborations with the U.S. and China should be integral to Europe’s strategy in both research and regulation. As she succinctly puts it in her keynote at the Rise of AI Conference 2024, “without AI no company can be successful.”