Someone has to make the start - everyone who comes after will find it easier. And to make this start more attractive, Minister of Economic Affairs Hubert Aiwanger presented a funding decision for around 800,000 euros to OTH Regensburg and OmniCert Umweltgutachter GmbH from Bad Abbach on May 16, 2025. The Minister of Economic Affairs emphasized: "Digitizing processes saves time, relieves the burden on employees and makes us more competitive. This is exactly where the BAICert project comes in. It shows how digital technologies can be put to good use in practice. This benefits companies, administration and entire industries."
Under the name BAICert - Bavarian Artificial Intelligence in Certification Processes, OTH Regensburg and OmniCert will conduct joint research and development over the next three years. The aim is to make previously manual and bureaucratic testing and administrative processes significantly more efficient. In particular, certification companies and authorities are to be supported in reading and checking documents, clerks are to be relieved of their workload and customers are to be given easy access to information - all based on automated algorithms and artificial intelligence. "OmniCert not only brings a great deal of expertise to the table, but also a close connection to agriculture and forestry - an area in which digital solutions have hardly been used to date. Thanks to its proximity to practice, the project can help to facilitate access to digital applications and make their benefits more tangible," said the Minister of Economic Affairs, explaining the background to the funding from the Free State of Bavaria.
Why is an environmental verification organization like OmniCert investing almost one million euros in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) if this is not its primary day-to-day business? “We don't want to rely on existing providers when using AI, as their solutions generally don't meet our high data protection requirements,” explains IT specialist and project manager at OmniCert Christoph Reithmair. “We also believe it is imperative that Germany does not become dependent on foreign solutions when it comes to AI.”
For Managing Director and founder Thorsten Grantner, one thing is also clear: "AI will change our working world. As controversial as the discussions about the future of AI may be, all experts agree that AI will be an important work tool in the future. AI can and will take over routine tasks and that is precisely the approach we are pursuing. We want all experts to work more on content, because that is what they are trained for and what they are good at. Up to now, we have had to spend a lot of time transferring data from one document to another, filing evidence or checking that documents are complete. In future, we can have more intelligent programs do this for us."
Many companies in the auditing professions, such as auditors and tax consultants, as well as public authorities and other sectors, feel the same way as OmniCert. To ensure that large parts of the Bavarian SME sector benefit in the long term, the AI solution developed by OTH Regensburg and OmniCert will be made available to the public as an open source model once the project has been completed. Other companies and authorities can then use the basis of the AI and develop it further for their needs.
OmniCert has been working successfully with the Regensburg Center for Artificial Intelligence (RCAI) at OTH Regensburg since participating in the KI Transfer Plus funding program of the Free State of Bavaria. The next step in the collaboration is the BAICert project. The RCAI has created its own doctoral position at the Laboratory for Imaging and Data Science (IMDS) in order to provide scientific support for the project and incorporate the latest research findings.
Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Jürgen Frikel is the project manager at OTH Regensburg: "Research on and with AI is highly exciting and complex. It is often inspired by practical problems - because in order to gain new scientific insights, science needs real-life use cases. At the same time, it is crucial to ensure the transfer into practice," he explains the motivation for the collaboration. Companies like OmniCert offer an ideal testing ground for this: they have a digital database that has been developed over many years, digitized processes and a strong will to innovate. For more than a decade, OmniCert has been digitizing all documents and creating its work results in its own software, which already works in part with automation - a valuable basis for the use and further development of AI.
In principle, a public authority could also be considered as a test field. However, the problem there is often that many work steps are still analog - and without digital processes and large amounts of data, AI cannot operate effectively.
Selbstdenker AG from Regensburg is supporting the project with the programming and integration of the AI algorithm into the ongoing business. Selbstdenker developed customized business software for OmniCert 13 years ago, which is now used to map all of the company's key processes. They know the nodes in the system where AI needs to start or continue working. CEO Stephan Fürnrohr and his team are on fire for the new project: "The higher the bar, the greater our enthusiasm for the project. Being part of a collaboration in which science and real-life implementation are so closely linked makes every developer's heart beat faster." Another important reason for the collaboration: all customer data and the development of the AI itself are stored on regional servers under strict data protection criteria.
With the Bavarian Collaborative Research Programme for Digitalization (BayVFP), the Free State of Bavaria supports “pre-competitive” (https://www.foerderdatenbank.de/) research and development projects by companies and their partners, e.g. scientific institutions.
