Europe’s key to the AI-driven battlefield will take a decade to build, the CEO of Airbus has said.
CEO Guillaume Faury, who has urged the continent to collaborate more on defense since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, told CNBC the protocols to exchange data between countries and teams on the battlefield were still “still quite limited.”
The planemaker and defense company is part of efforts to improve information–sharing between European countries through what Faury called a “combat cloud,” to better share data between “satellites, tankers, fighter jets, helicopters, and also objects on the ground” for security purposes. The project is part of the Future Combat System, which also aims to create a new fighter jet, remote carriers for aerial combat support.
“That’s a key enabler of the future digital battlefield that is going to take place when there is confrontation in the future,” Faury told CNBC’s Charlotte Reed in a fireside chat at the Adopt AI conference in Paris this week. But, he added it will take years to get the combat cloud up and running.
“We are already today connecting objects digitally. There are protocols to exchange data between different objects, but those protocols are quite limited, and it’s not like a network where everyone can connect like a cloud,” he added.
“So, it will take a decade, maybe a decade and a half, before we are at the level we want to be. But there are incremental ways of connecting objects that are being applied already,” Faury said.
“We need to create players in Europe at scale,” he added. “When we create players at scale, we can compete with the Americans or the Chinese.”
Faury has been vocal about his frustration about defense efforts since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
In October Airbus, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Italy’s Leonardo and France’s Thales to combine their space projects in a bid to establish a European leader that can rival the likes of Elon Musk‘s Starlink.
Satellites underpin modern and critical infrastructure today, such as telecommunications, science and national security.
Leonardo on Thursday is expected to reveal plans for an AI-driven missile shield, dubbed the ‘Michelangelo Dome,’ that connects different equipment and platforms.
Faury said he expected Airbus’ three-way partnership to “be able to fuel innovation, to do the right level of investments in Europe, for Europe and also for the rest of the world.”
