Apply AI: Challenge-Driven AI Innovation Booster in Apply AI prioritised sectors (RIA) (Partnership in AI, Data and Robotics) -

The Apply AI Strategy[1] proposes a comprehensive set of measures to notably harness the transformative potential of AI. It lays down targeted measures to boost AI use in key strategic sectors of the EU economy including healthcare, mobility and manufacturing for example. With challenges designed to spark breakthroughs in such strategic sectors, the current topic will directly support key activities of the Apply AI Strategy.

Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

• Significant technological progress and innovation in Apply AI Strategy's prioritised sectors driven by challenge-oriented, AI-powered solutions.
• Increase competitiveness and visibility of the relevant AI community within key application domains, and promote collaborative approaches for AI development in these domains, fostering the ecosystem.
• Increase adoption of AI technologies across the following three key application domains: healthcare, advanced manufacturing (including AI-powered robotics) and in-vehicle autonomous driving.

The Challenge-Driven AI Innovation Booster aims to drive significant technological progress and innovation in Apply AI prioritised sectors through challenge-oriented, AI-powered solutions. This initiative seeks to boost Europe's developer community and the adoption of powerful, trustworthy AI solutions in three strategic domains such as:

• In healthcare - advanced AI will accelerate diagnostics and treatment plans, enhance robotic surgery, or improve patient care through predictive analytics.
• In advanced manufacturing - advanced AI will optimize production processes, improve quality control and product design, or enable predictive maintenance.
• In autonomous driving - advanced AI will enhance vehicle safety, improve navigation systems, or optimize traffic management. Provided sufficient quality of the proposals received, at least one selected project will focus on in-vehicle autonomous driving applications, in line with the Automotive Action Plan, ensuring coordination with the announced Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Alliance.

Each proposal should focus exclusively on one of the three key sectors mentioned above.

It is expected to focus primarily on the definition and organization of a multi-stage competition in the chosen sector, as well as on the accompanying support to the SMEs/teams taking part in each of the challenges.

User-industry companies from the strategic sector targeted by the proposal should be core partners in each consortium. They should demonstrate a genuine interest in the project results and therefore support the challenge participants to reach the most powerful and exploitable results benefiting their industry. The expected results are pre-competitive, but the proposal must include a draft exploitation plan focused on how the solutions developed by the third parties will be taken up, with support from the user-industry partners for their future exploitation.

The consortium leading the project is responsible for the various stages of the challenges. This consortium should provide the necessary support resources during each stage of the competition (including technical assistance and business support to develop an exploitation strategy) and, most importantly, the consortium should ensure that the teams competing for and receiving financial support to third parties have access to relevant data to fine-tune models and build high-impact solutions meeting industry needs.

Proposals should be driven by impactful use-cases where advanced AI can make the difference: a number of industries from the targeted sector are expected to join forces to define challenging problems to solve with advanced AI solutions, which then drive the rest of the project. Based on such challenges, each project consortium should organize a multi-staged competition with an increasing level of complexity. In the different stages (see below), third parties, either single SMEs or small teams of organisations led by an SME, compete to address the challenges with advanced AI solutions.

For each proposal:

Stage 1 - Open call: The consortium launches an open call for proposals. A challenge, open to all, will allow the selection for Stage 2 of the 10 highest-ranked proposals according to a pre-defined selection process and criteria. Each solution is expected to be submitted either by a single SME, developer of advanced AI solutions, or a small team of organizations led by such SME.

Stage 2 - Competition among Stage 1 winners: The 10 teams or organisations selected from Stage 1 receive a EUR 300,000 FSTP grant each in accordance with their successfully selected proposal (which addresses the tasks and challenges defined for this stage by the consortium). At the end of Stage 2, the 4 highest-ranked solutions will be selected for the next stage according to a pre-defined selection process and criteria.

Stage 3 – Grand finale (Competition among Stage 2 winners): The 4 teams or organisations selected from Stage 2 receive EUR 2,250,000 FSTP grants each in accordance with their successfully selected proposals to address the tasks and challenges for this stage. In conjunction, they will prepare for the grand finale that will identify the best performing solution at the end of Stage 3 according to the evaluation methodology defined by the consortium.

The consortium should define measures to support the winners in maximizing the impact and uptake of their solutions. For instance, after the end of the FSTP grant, the best-performing team could be offered the opportunity to conclude partnerships or contracts with the user industries leading the consortium. Measures to support the broad uptake of their solutions in the whole sector should also be considered.

Such a multi-staged scheme is expected to be implemented in parallel by the projects funded under this action, each addressing a different sector.

Each proposal, involving several major industry players, should define a clear methodology to implement the various steps of the approach, define the specifications of the stages of the competitions, timelines, targets, KPIs, and propose a solid evaluation methodology including evaluation criteria. The main information should be in the proposal, in addition to all mandatory requirements as concerns financial support to third parties. The beneficiaries will also be in charge of implementing the evaluation methodology and providing the necessary infrastructure/technical support for the participants in the challenges. The consortium members are also responsible for ensuring high visibility of the competitions.

The projects selected from this call, each addressing one of the three targeted sectors, are expected to collaborate among themselves to make economies of scale in sharing best practices, defining processes for organizing the challenges, ensuring efficient monitoring, organizing dissemination and communication activities, etc. Such collaboration among the linked actions is expected to be formalized by a collaboration agreement after the grant agreement signature.

For each proposal, a total of EUR 3,000,000 is foreseen to be distributed among the winners of Stage 1, in the form of FSTP grants, to prepare for Stage 2. In addition, EUR 9,000,000 is foreseen to be distributed among the winners of Stage 2, in the form of FSTP grants, to prepare for Stage 3 of the challenge. The proposal is expected to make the case for such investment in defining the objectives and expected results. This amount will be distributed equally among the 4 winning teams of Stage 2, who are expected to develop further their solutions and compete for Stage 3.

Visibility would be important; therefore, dissemination and communication campaigns are key. The proposers are also encouraged to seek sponsorship, which would be key for the visibility and prestige of their challenge and to attract the best developers from the eligible countries to compete, particularly SMEs, alone or within a team competing for the challenges.

All proposals are expected to incorporate mechanisms for assessing and demonstrating progress, including qualitative and quantitative KPIs, benchmarking, and progress monitoring.

When possible, proposals should build on and reuse public results from relevant previous funded actions. Communicable results should be shared with the European R&D community through the AI-on-demand platform and, if necessary, other relevant digital resource platforms to bolster the European AI, Data, and Robotics ecosystem by disseminating results and best practices.

This topic implements the co-programmed European Partnership on AI, data, and robotics (ADRA), and all proposals are expected to allocate tasks for cohesion activities with ADRA and the CSA HORIZON-CL4-2025-03-HUMAN-18: GenAI4EU central Hub.

Proposals should also build on or seek collaboration with relevant projects and develop synergies with other relevant International, European, national, or regional initiatives. Projects selected in this topic will link to the resources offered by the AI Factories, including the Data Labs. The results may be validated in the Testing and Experiment Facilities and further deployed via the European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIHs) and will contribute to the Apply AI strategy.

[1] COM(2025) 723 Apply AI Strategy

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