Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury said Europe’s AI-driven battlefield will take a decade to build.
Faury has urged the continents to be more collaborative on defence since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and told CNBNC the protocols to exchange data between countries and teams on the battlefield were still “quite limited”.
Airbus has become 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 also part of the Future Combat System.
“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.
However, Faury also added that the cloud system could take a while to be built.
“It will take a decade, maybe a decade and a half, before we are at the level we want to be,” Faury said.
“But there are incremental ways of connecting objects that are being applied already.”
Faury has been vocal about his frustrations regarding defence efforts since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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.
