Bringing Artificial Intelligence towards SMEs

 Danube Region is formed by a heterogeneous and complex pool of countries and regions with respect to population, geographical size, business and innovation-maturity, and development level. Nonetheless, Danube Region countries also face many common challenges, which can be tackled with the help of well targeted transnational interventions. In the past two decades Danube countries’ economies were predominantly working towards integrating themselves into European value chains - mostly automotive and machinery – leading to a re-orientation on cost-efficient-based manufacturing. However, brain drain, ageing, low demographics, among others, resulted in a constant increase in labour costs, thus, decreasing this key advantage for them. The region was further impacted by the transformation of the manufacturing and industrial landscape – with i4.0, automation, digitalization, energy crisis, collapse of international supply chains, disruptive artificial intelligence (AI), all leading to dramatic shifts in the ecosystem. Nonetheless, by consciously managing and exploiting these paradigm shifts , especially in very important sectors such as food industry, health sector (also the manufacturing) and sustainable energy, BrAIn project can reveal new development opportunities for the Danube countries. This transformation is foreseen under the broader framework of S3 - seen by the EC Regulation 2021/1060 as enabling conditions for financing innovation (PA1) at territorial level. 

 BrAIn project is new, original and innovative by proposing work on cutting age topics such as AI and i40/i5.0 skills in specific sectors – agri-food, manufacturing and health, and alongside pre-defined domains: green energy, labour force management and supply chain. BrAIN will implement place based demo-days and pilots, all leading to hands-on transnational knowledge-transfer acting as a validation point for the S3 strategies of the respected geographical areas