The 2018 Coordinated Plan on AI represented a joint commitment by the European Commission and Member States to work together to maximise Europe’s potential to compete globally. It laid the ground for cooperation, defined areas for investments and encouraged Member States to develop national strategic visions on AI. The processes and the public debates, in Member States, the EU and globally, triggered by the 2018 Coordinated Plan, indicate that it was an essential first step to define a common direction and objectives for a European policy on AI. As a result of the actions agreed and facilitated by the 2018 Coordinated Plan, most Member States have adopted national AI strategies and started to implement them; investments in AI have increased and the EU was able to mobilise a critical resources pool to support those processes.
The 2021 review of the Coordinated Plan is the next step – it puts forward a concrete set of joint actions for the European Commission and Member States on how to create EU global leadership on trustworthy AI. The proposed key actions reflect the vision that to succeed, the European Commission together with Member States and private actors need to:
- accelerate investments in AI technologies to drive resilient economic and social recovery facilitated by the uptake of new digital solutions;
- act on AI strategies and programmes by implementing them fully and in a timely manner
- to ensure that the EU reaps the full benefits of first-mover adopter advantages; and
- align AI policy to remove fragmentation and address global challenges.
Read the review here.