In 2025, the Digital Business Models division further expanded its role as a driving force for future technologies and their commercial application. In the field of quantum computing, the division, in collaboration with IBM, supported the Quantum Community DACH by organising meet-ups and watch parties in Cologne, thereby specifically strengthening exchange in a technological field that is becoming increasingly relevant for digital sovereignty and innovation capacity.

At the same time, LEAM was successfully launched as a strategic future project for sovereign European AI: from 2026, the Center for Sovereign AI (CESAI) is to establish a high-performance ecosystem for open and industry-specific AI models in the Rhenish mining region; public funding of around 130 million Euro is planned. The initiative is supported by a strong network of industry and research partners, including Audi, Telekom, Siemens Energy, Materna and IABG within the LEAM environment.

In parallel, the division acted as an associated partner in the Learn2RAG project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space, organising workshops in Cologne and Berlin and thereby supporting the transfer of Retrieval-Augmented Generation into the operational practice of SMEs.

With the cooperation with the IndustryFusion Foundation announced in September 2025 at the SCHWEISSEN & SCHNEIDEN trade fair in Essen, the Digital Business Models division established a further strategic building block for its work on Industrial IoT and sovereign data spaces (in accordance with the Gaia-X principles) for industry. The focus of the collaboration is on the further development of open data spaces, edge/cloud infrastructures and interoperable standards for Industry 4.0, which are to be translated into concrete industrial use cases.

A visible next milestone was the Industrial AI Open Source Summit 2025, held jointly with eco and EuroCloud Germany on 29 and 30 October in Bad Wörishofen, where issues relating to open, European and scalable industrial AI, interoperability and regulatory feasibility were explored in a practical manner. In doing so, the division consistently advanced its activities relating to Industrial IoT and industrial data spaces in 2025 and embedded them within a growing network of industry, the cloud industry and the open-source community.

In this way, in 2025 the Digital Business Models division not only addressed future technologies at a strategic level, but effectively translated them into corporate practice through concrete formats, strong partnerships and application-oriented projects.