The structural barriers and drivers of change faced by SMEs in Spain

The distance that exists between the technological promise of streamlining the internal processes of companies thanks to a technology as disruptive as generative artificial intelligence (AI) is usually affected by the slowness of the ‘internal bureaucracy’ that slows down these changes that must occur in all departments.

The round table ‘Business transformation: from technological promise to real impact’, at the 2nd Europa Press Technology Day held this Tuesday, has given some of the key*on how startups present themselves as the engine of new businesses in companies in which the movements that occur are usually slower due to their own structure or operations.

The coordinator of the Area in the General Subdirectorate of Citizenship, Talent and Digital Entrepreneurship, Cristina Roca, maintains that the Ministry of Digital Transformation believes that three keys are needed. The first is to ensure that the environment is favorable for startups to be born and grow. The second is financing, since most of them fail due to lack of resources, and the third is training.

Among the measures that have been adopted to create this favorable space for startups are laws such as the one approved in 2022 (Startup Law), which reduces administrative obstacles so that one can be created in less than 24 hours, or the creation of the Digital Nomad Visa, which helps attract entrepreneurial talent within Spain.

Furthermore, “in 2024, the National Forum of Emerging Companies was created, which basically seeks to promote the entrepreneurial ecosystem and identify the barriers it faces,” highlighted Cristina Roca.

The lever of change to the success of LaLiga has been and is artificial intelligence, which promotes innovation and technology for clubs and all aspects that have to do with the sports sector.

“We have created an artificial intelligence department to promote this technology. We were the first company in the sports sector to promote AI technology. We use both artificial intelligence and machine learning in the tools and projects we work on,” said LaLiga’s Director of Technology, Innovation and Artificial Intelligence, Prasanna Kumar.

LaLiga measures the real impact of the use of this technology with Alex, its virtual ‘influencer’, or with the project with which, thanks to the use of artificial intelligence, the match schedule is managed. LaLiga reinforces the use of AI among its employees, adapting it to their work culture so that they know how to navigate a space of technological uncertainty.

The Director of Strategy at Sngular, Julián de Cabo, provides his perspective on the real impact of a technology like artificial intelligence by commenting: “We forget that transforming means changing things, and discarding things that do not work and replacing them with new things, which is something that organizations, by definition, are reactive to do.”

It indicates that really these waves of changes, such as the one currently experienced with generative AI, the one experienced with the digital transformation or the Internet revolution, are turning points that allow SMEs to remodel their businesses, but as long as the focus is placed on what really matters, since in many cases organizations get it completely wrong.

In his words, “It is essential that those who run the company understand what this technology provides, which is the first premise that usually begins as a failure.” And he points out that organizations normally, when a profile appears that is willing to change everything, try to put it in a corner at the back of the hallway so that it does not bother too much instead of betting on it.

In the round table, a key issue for the technological transformation of companies was also discussed: how they should bet on startups as suppliers or even drivers of new businesses in these large organizations.

Cristina Roca maintains that they play an important role thanks to their flexibility, ability to adapt and specialization. It means being a strategic partner in companies that are more reluctant to move quickly: “We have to do it accompanied by startups, the entrepreneurial ecosystem, because in the end these companies not only provide technology and innovation, but also a culture of flexibility and adaptation to the environment, which are very important qualities in the area in which we currently live,” he adds.

Female entrepreneurship is also currently facing challenges and the data proves it. According to the Alternativas Foundation report last year, only 20% of companies are founded by women. Cristina Roca clarifies that “there are certain structural barriers. The first of them is the lack of financing. Only 3% of investment in venture capital goes to companies founded by women. This is due to the lack of credibility when presenting projects or the low female representation in the investment committees of the funds.”

Cristina Roca refers to the support measures with these words: “To date we have already granted more than 280 loans for a value of more than 42 million euros. The objective is to reduce structural barriers such as financing, although without forgetting the importance of structured mentoring that exemplifies the importance of references, since 43% of the women who have received it and have a company manage to scale it in less than three years.”

LaLiga faces its own challenges that they face with their own solutions to generate competitive advantage. This is their main difference, since instead of depending on other technologies, they prefer to create their own technologies as a crucial aspect of the organization.

They look to the near future with a greater number of automations based on artificial intelligence to improve operational efficiency as well as that of clubs, coaching staffs and even players, since they will be able to improve their performance with key measurements provided by AI models.

In fact, the teams that make up organizations and SMEs are being affected by job layoffs. A moment that Julián de Cabo has alluded to as an excuse to put dozens of workers on the street, when previously a reorganization of the team should have been carried out.

The important thing is to know if the company frees up resources by applying an ERE and uses them for the training and retraining of its workforce. And this ‘reskilling’ is based not only on presenting good results on an exam, but on how the worker (or in the case of his students, being a teacher in his free time) uses artificial intelligence.

The closing of the day included the director of Innovation, AI and Business of Red.es, Víctor Rodrigo, who alluded to the book ‘The Third Wave’, by Alvin Toffler, to affirm that we are in the “fourth wave” of the transformations of humanity, the wave of AI. As a summary, he highlighted that it is not about “putting technology on top of old processes, nor about digitizing what already existed without asking whether it makes sense to digitize what we were doing.”