The challenge is to fully exploit the potential of AI in the economy and society. Building notably on Europe's Scientific and Technology strengths in the field, the supported activities should reinforce industrial competitiveness across all sectors including for SMEs and non-tech industries and help address societal challenges (e.g. ageing, transport, gender equality). The ambition is to bring AI technologies and resources to integrators and innovators in all sectors and actively engage with a wide user community, to foster adoption of AI, via use-cases experiments.

AI-on-demand platform: consolidation and exploitation ­­

This topic builds on the AI-on-demand-platform funded in ICT26-2018-20, a reference access point gathering and providing access to AI-related knowledge, algorithms and tools and access to related infrastructures, equipment, and data resources, offering also experts support to potential users of AI in order to facilitate the integration of AI into applications, making it a compelling solution for users, especially from non-tech sectors.

This activity aims at consolidating the eco-system by bringing in a larger user community, especially from the non-tech sector, and by reinforcing the service layer of the platform. At this stage, it will be particularly important to refine mechanisms to ensure the platform's long-term sustainability. The platform should provide a good European coverage, both in terms origin of the resources made available on the platform, but also in terms of users of the platform, making sure its resource is available everywhere in Europe.

The objectives:

• Reinforce the service layer of the AI-on-demand-platform funded in ICT26-2018-20 to facilitate the use and uptake of the platform resources.
• Reaching out to new user domains and boosting the use of the platform through use cases and small-scale experiments. The task will involve financial support to third parties, in line with the conditions set out in part K of the General Annexes. Minimum EUR 2 million funding should be dedicated to it, with EUR 50.000 to 200.000 per third party (amount higher than EUR 60.000^[1]should be justified, based on need of expensive hardware or infrastructure for instance). The selection process should prioritise projects maximising the impact of the platform and demonstrating the benefit of AI in products, processes or services. Particular attention will be paid to SMEs and low-tech sector, which can best benefit from the support offered by the platform. The selected projects should also cover a wide spread of application sectors, to demonstrate the versatility and scalability of the platform offer.

Proposals will ensure continuity with the project selected under ICT26-2018-20, having access to all the knowledge and offer needed to fully exploit it and be able to build on it. The improvements resulting from the selected projects should be made available and open to the community via the platform, to allow full exploitation, and also further developments by entities outside the consortia, building on these results.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of up to EUR 5 million would allow this area to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

• Enriching and optimising the AI on-demand platform service offer and reinforcing its sustainability
• Boosting the deployment of AI-based solutions and services, enabling a larger user community to reap the economic benefits of AI, especially SMEs and non-technology sectors