Apply AI Strategy
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Summary
The Strategy adopts an “AI-first” approach to accelerate adoption across flagship sectors (including health, robotics, manufacturing, defence/space, mobility, telecoms, energy, environment, agri-food, and culture/media) backed by around €1 billion from EU programmes to catalyse deployment. It tackles cross-cutting barriers by turning EDIHs into AI Experience Centres for SMEs, building frontier capabilities via a new Frontier AI initiative, and providing clear, practical support for AI Act compliance through guidance and a Service Desk. Governance is unified through an Apply AI Alliance and an AI Observatory to set KPIs and monitor impact, complemented by the AI in Science and Data Union strategies.
Action items
1–6 of 36 items
Source order · D = digital dimension- Item 1
establish European AI-powered advanced screening centres to accelerate the introduction of innovative tools for prevention and diagnosis making in healthcare facilities and bringing healthcare services to underserved areas. The initiative aims to improve early detection and ensure timely diagnosis, in particular for cardiovascular diseases and cancer. It will pursue an approach to ensure that AI-powered screening and diagnosis take into account gender-specific factors. By deploying AI solutions, these centres will support real-world clinical validation and local performance testing and generate evidence for clinical adoption. The network of these AI-powered centres will facilitate access to high-quality datasets building on the European Health Data Space as well as the European digital infrastructures for the cancer imaging and genomic data, and support testing and validation of promising AI models including for personalised prevention. This will build on the relevant actions under the Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan, Life Sciences Strategy and the forthcoming EU Cardiovascular Health Plan.
- Item 2
establish a European Network of Expertise on AI Deployment in Healthcare to consolidate guidelines and best practices. It will deliver deployment playbooks, guidelines including on local validation (performance in clinical practice) and post-deployment monitoring, design principles and set the foundations for exchanging best practices on AI deployment in healthcare.
- Item 3
launch an AI drug discovery challenge for potential new drugs that could be used to address unmet medical needs and treat diseases that have proven difficult to cure, such as Alzheimer’s disease or certain cancers. The winner of the challenge would receive dedicated access to AI Factories compute capacity and on advice how to bring their discoveries to the market.
- Item 4
propose appropriate actions to streamline and enable quicker market entry of medical devices without compromising safety.
- Item 5
establish a Catalyst for the uptake of European Robotics, bringing together developers and user industries to accelerate the development and uptake of European solutions replying to market needs. This will be done in collaboration with the AI Data and Robotics Association. In this context, the Commission will fund the development of sectoral Acceleration Pipelines for the adoption of AI-powered robotics, focussing on high-impact use-cases, prioritised in close collaboration with end-user industries, ensuring that innovation aligns with real-world needs.
- Item 6
support the development of frontier AI model and AI agents adapted to manufacturing. Building on the Data Spaces for Manufacturing24 and the forthcoming Data Union Strategy, the Commission will facilitate data pooling across industrial actors through trusted third parties, to ensure a sufficient volume of training data, while preserving intellectual property and data security and making use, as relevant, of the data labs in AI Factories.