Artificial intelligence is a growing market and in Italy it is worth 1.8 billion: +50% year on year. Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands are further ahead: they have consolidated strategies and innovation hubs. In Europe, the average AI adoption rate in companies is 13.5%, in Italy 8.2%. Five percentage points behind, and the main cause is the characteristic factor of the Italian economy: the large presence of SMEs.
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71% of large Italian companies have started at least one artificial intelligence project and 84% have already purchased licenses for at least one Generative AI tool. Among SMEs the figure is 8%. The numbers are compiled by the report from Roma Business School (Rbs), which proposes a solution to bring together the excellences of the Italian districts. Fashion, mechanics, agri-food, pharmaceuticals and boating are the sectors that make the Italian economy strong and competitive, while remaining on a small business scale. The report thus proposes a Dataspace of the Districts of Italy: pooling industrial data and training vertical AI models.
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Turning a limit into an opportunity
“The Italian production fragmentation, historically its limit, becomes here an asset,” explains Valentino Megale, co-author of the proposal. Large LLMs (language models) have horizontal training and tend to respond generically. Instead, putting data together to create vertical AI could create models suitable for specific sectors and, therefore, more useful at work.
Megale argues that an existing cloud infrastructure can be exploited: the National Strategic Hub. It is a set of Italian data centers funded by the PNRR and active since December 2022 to store and process critical and strategic data of public administrations. The proposal is to extend its functionality to the private sector. Once the European funds are exhausted, he explains, it could continue with financing from a public-private co-investment fund, leveraging the Italian venture capital system.
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