MADE Competence Center is a highly specialized center established in Italy as part of the National Industry 4.0 Plan. It recently signed an agreement with the Italian Institute of Artificial Intelligence for Industry (AI4I) to promote innovation in national companies. The agreement, valid until December 2027, consists in the implementation of joint initiatives to support the spread of AI in the national production system. The focus is mainly on SMEs and the manufacturing sector.
The partnership aims to strengthen the ability of Italian companies to integrate AI into their production and organizational processes through a strategic alliance between advanced research, technology transfer, training, and technical support.
“This agreement – says Marco Taisch, President of MADE Competence Center – represents a decisive step in accelerating the adoption of Artificial Intelligence in Italian manufacturing companies. By joining forces with AI4I we bring together expertise, technologies and operational tools to offer SMEs not only strategic vision, but also concrete and accessible solutions. Small and medium-sized enterprises today need industrial AI, geared toward real use cases such as predictive maintenance, process optimization and automated quality control. At the same time, the application culture of generative AI needs to be developed, making people understand its opportunities and limitations. Our goal is to make AI a real factor of competitiveness, sustainability and growth for the entire national production system”.
Areas of collaboration
Specifically, the collaboration covers various areas: technical consulting and continuing education, as well as complementary content between AI4I Academy and MADE. This aims to create a culture around issues related to digitization. Besides, the partnership aims to raise awareness among businesses, institutions, and trade associations.
The two partners intend to share access to HPC (High Performance Computing) resources, which enable processing data and performing complex calculations at high speed. They also intend to participate jointly in European and national calls.
But that’s not all. The collaboration extends to Italy’s AI Factory (one of the first strategic Artificial Intelligence platforms in Europe) and to certain services. One of these is AI4I’s System User Knowledge, a platform for matching supply and demand for AI solutions. Another tool is DRAIVE (Data-Driven Roadmap for AI Vision and Excellence) methodology developed by MADE.
“Through this collaboration – commented Antonio Emilio Calegari, Director of AI4I – we want to strengthen the impact of our activities by providing the manufacturing sector with concrete tools, strategic resources and a shared vision of AI-driven industrial innovation”.
MADE (coordinator of the European AI-MATTERS project in Italy) and AI4I (established in 2024 by MEF, MIMIT, and MUR) aim to build an effective bridge between advanced research and concrete market needs.
