The Netherlands & AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have a major impact on our future prosperity and well-being. Due to its generic nature, AI will have an impact on all business sectors, our private lives and society as a whole. The Netherlands sees AI as a key enabling digital technology to tackle societal challenges of our time. In that sense public-private cooperation between science, companies and government is at its core to create human centric AI solutions. Only by proactively deploying AI can we, as the Netherlands, help determine how AI is applied to social and economic challenges and benefit from it. AI is not an end in itself, but a powerful means to maintain and develop our international competitiveness and to solve economic and social issues. European cooperation on enabling factors to make AI work such as data sharing, R&D and IT infrastructure are essential for this international competitiveness.
Common approach
In order to realize this and to stimulate the Dutch AI activities, the Dutch AI Coalition has been set up (NL AIC). The NL AIC is a public-private partnership in which government, industry, educational and research institutions and civil society organisations are engaged for the purpose of accelerating AI developments in the Netherlands and connecting AI initiatives in the Netherlands. The aspiration is to establish the Netherlands at the forefront of knowledge and the application of AI for prosperity and welfare in compliance with Dutch and European standards and values. The NL AIC works as the key catalyst for AI applications in our country. One of the most important goals is to realise impactful AI innovations in at least ten economic and social sectors within three years. This is where we apply AI and work on our earning capacity and tackling societal challenges.
Working groups areas of application
AI is a generic technology that ultimately can be applied in all sectors. It is important to focus on specific sectors that are relevant to the Netherlands, where good results can be achieved and where knowledge and experience can be scaled up for application in other sectors. Working groups have been set up for the following application areas: Energy and Sustainability, Safety, Peace and Law, Technical Industry, Education, Agriculture and Food, Defence, Health and Care, Public Services, Financial Services and Mobility, Transportation and Logistics. Working group leaders will work with the participants to identify the greatest opportunities and challenges for AI in their field, connect collaborative partners and develop a programme.
The NL AIC also collaborates on the necessary knowledge, expertise and results on five themes, also called building blocks, which are important for an innovative impact in economic and social application areas.
- Human Capital: the availability of sufficient talent (including retraining and further training);
- Research and Innovation: developing new AI knowledge through scientific and applied research and making it ideally accessible to stakeholders;
- Data Sharing: facilitating making data available and sharing data;
- Social acceptance, frameworks, inclusion: achieving social acceptance of AI by involving end users in research, innovation and application, an inclusive approach and in developing ethical, legal and social frameworks in co-creation;
- Start-ups and Scale-ups: supporting AI-driven start-ups and scale-ups in tapping into and leveraging resources, data and partners (match-making) for their business development.
Particularly for international cooperation the Netherlands also sees itself as an ideal testing ground with its excellent research institutions, universities and cooperation with the private sector through the Field Labs.
Read more in the action agenda on the website of NL AI coalitie. https://nlaic.com/
