The EU has printed its ‘AI Continent Motion Plan’ (COM(2025)165).
The Plan goals to reinforce the EU’s AI capabilities by selling initiatives round 5 key areas. A kind of key areas considerations the promotion of AI in strategic sectors and, particularly, within the public sector and healthcare.
The Plan consists of some excessive degree initiatives which can be, nevertheless, not new.
The Plan refreshes the expectation for the general public sector to supply a supply of funding and experimentation for AI improvement: ‘EU public procurement, accounting for over 15% of our GDP, may create an infinite marketplace for revolutionary services and products.’ This has been a long-standing aspiration (eg Fostering a European method to Synthetic Intelligence, COM(2021)205).
In that regard, the Plan reiterates the objective of the Competitiveness Compass to advertise ‘European desire in public procurement for essential sectors and applied sciences within the context of the forthcoming evaluation of the EU guidelines’, and clearly locations AI amongst them. We must await particulars, however the compatibility of an EU desire with worldwide procurement regulation escapes me.
The Plan additionally refers back to the upcoming ‘Apply AI Technique’ which ought to ‘handle adoption by the general public sector, the place AI in areas like healthcare can convey transformative advantages to wellbeing’.
The Plan additionally features a reference to:
a name for funding of as much as 4 pilot tasks aimed toward accelerating the deployment of European generative AI options in public administrations; and
the truth that the ‘GovTech Incubator initiative will, over the interval 2025-2029, assist 21 GovTech actors from 16 international locations to co-pilot and develop, as a primary step, AI options for public procurement, proof processing and accessibility assistants.’
General, whereas it’s attention-grabbing to see procurement being highlighted as a part of the Plan, it appears that evidently the Plan will not be on the proper scale to advertise the form of system-level change required for intensive adoption of AI within the public sector (at Member State degree).
What’s extra, with out a clear technique on how you can handle the problems of digital expertise throughout the public sector, and with out particular sensible instruments or steering on how you can procure AI (and the mannequin EU clauses are undoubtedly not an enough software, see right here), it’s arduous to see how there might be a lot motion exterior pilot tasks. Maybe the ‘Apply AI Technique’ will present some developments on these fronts.
