Apply AI Strategy

The Apply AI Strategy is designed to enhance the competitiveness of strategic sectors and strengthen the EU’s technological sovereignty. It aims to boost AI adoption and innovation across Europe, particularly among Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs).

The Strategy encourages an AI first policy where AI is considered as a potential solution whenever organisations make strategic or policy decisions, taking into careful consideration the benefits and the risks of the technology. The Apply AI also promotes a 'buy European' approach, particularly for the public sector, with a focus on open source AI solutions.

What are the goals of the Apply AI Strategy?

The Strategy complements the AI Continent Action Plan, with concrete actions, aimed at harnessing AI's transformative potential. It contains 3 sections:

• sectoral flagships including targeted measures to boost AI adoption across 10 key industry sectors and the public sector. The industrial sectors include healthcare and pharmaceuticals, mobility, transport and automotive, robotics, manufacturing, engineering and construction, climate and environment, energy, agri-food, defence, security and space, electronic communications and cultural, creative and media sectors. The AI-powered advanced screening centres are an example of a flagship in healthcare.
• support measures and actions to increase EU’s technological sovereignty by tackling cross-cutting challenges to AI development and adoption. It reinforces the role of the European Digital Innovation Hubs which were transformed into Experience Centres for AI to become access points to the EU AI innovation ecosystem. This includes AI Factories and AI Gigafactories, AI Testing and Experimentation Facilities and AI regulatory sandboxes. Several measures to enable an AI-ready workforce are also planned.
• the creation of a new governance system. The Apply AI Alliance is the main coordination forum that brings together AI providers, industry leaders, academia, and the public sector to ensure policy actions are grounded in real-world needs. Closely connected to the Alliance, the AI Observatory will track AI trends and assess impact of AI in specific sectors.

Download the strategy and its annexes:

	The Apply AI Strategy is designed to support industries and the public sector to better understand what AI can do, where it is effective and how it can bring competitive advantage.
	The strategy has 3 annexes (also available at the bottom of link above). 1 - Summary table of the structured dialogues organised to inform the Strategy 2 - The Commission’s own internal AI-related initiatives 3 - Summary table of AI-related actions of the Commission

Complementary strategies

The Apply AI Strategy was presented alongside the AI in Science strategy, which supports and incentivises the development and use of AI by the European scientific community. To deliver on this, the Commission has launched a pilot for the Resource for AI Science in Europe (RAISE). RAISE pools strategic resources - funding, compute, data and talent – and operates along two main pillars:

• Science for AI, supporting basic research to advance core AI capabilities, in particular safe and secure frontier AI
• AI in Science, promoting the use of AI for progress in different scientific disciplines

The Apply AI is also complemented by the Data Union Strategy, which ensures the availability of high-quality, large-scale datasets essential for training AI models.