AI integration in CCSI work practice: catalysing innovation and competitiveness

Expected Outcome:

Projects should contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

• Insights, recommendations, strategies, guidelines, methods and tools supporting full AI integration in CCSI practices become available to CCSI, policymakers, and stakeholders.
• Scenarios for co-created solutions tailored to CCSI needs, utilizing quality data and federated data sources, along with digital infrastructures, and inclusive cooperation processes, become available.
• Generally made available AI-powered and ethically designed solutions, tools and services in several CCSI areas benefit creators, cultural professionals, and society, including persons with disabilities and other specific needs, fostering innovative creative expressions and improving creative business models while preserving and enhancing cultural diversity, and inclusion.
• By mastering ethical and inclusive AI, CCSI are empowered drivers of culture, innovation, competitiveness and societal wellbeing.

Scope:

AI technologies are transformative, providing unprecedented opportunities for human creativity, experimentations and co-creations. AI profoundly impacts cultural and creative sectors and industries, changing practices, facilitating new ways of working and making innovative services and products possible. Artists, industry players, and cultural organisations increasingly use AI, for assistance in content creation, production, and management, to predict trends, personalise market content, engage audiences, enhance cultural heritage preservation and accessibility, and many more purposes.

Cultural and creative sectors and industries (CCSI)^[1] need to fully harness AI's potential to maintain relevance, expand their impact and value, increase competitiveness, and keep their vibrant, inclusive nature. Embracing and co-creating ethical AI solutions tailored to CCSI needs will, among other benefits, enable the automation of low-creativity tasks, allowing to increase focus on high-value activities that enhance creativity and productivity, thus unlocking unprecedented possibilities. Production times and costs can be reduced, market reach expanded, preservation, interpretation and inclusive access to cultural heritage enhanced, and new job categories could emerge.

Although several initiatives are on the ground, a comprehensive understanding of enabling frameworks and factors and of what is still lacking in terms of data, standards, infrastructures, computing power, tools, knowledge and capacity for the CCSI to fully embrace the opportunities opened by AI is essential for effectively integrating AI technologies into CCSI practices and workflows. Proposals should assess the current level of AI readiness in the CCSI, investigate the specific barriers to AI adoption in the sectors, and highlight areas where AI can offer the most benefits. In continuous engagement with the sectors, based on the analysis of current practices and through concrete use cases, proposals should produce strategic guidance to extensively and seamlessly integrate AI into CCSI operations, enhancing efficiencies, averting risks, and facilitating cross-sector collaboration. Based on this analysis, they should develop a set of tailored tools designed to address the specific gaps and leverage the opportunities uncovered during the assessment. These tools should be strategically aligned with the sector's needs, ensuring they provide targeted solutions to enhance AI adoption and maximize its potential benefits. They should be scalable, affordable for smaller, less-resourced CCSI actors and accompanied by related documentation and training materials and documentation.

Proposals should address one of the following two options, and are allowed to address both:

• Develop scalable pilots for innovative AI-enabled products and services across diverse segments of sectoral value chains, in cooperation with CCSI. These pilots are expected to address identified gaps in CCSI operations and prioritise solutions that catalyse innovation in sectors whose business models are not yet taking full advantage of AI. Applicants should have flexibility to select their preferred application areas.
• Design and pilot innovative, inclusive, ethically driven, transparent AI solutions to foster cultural and linguistic diversity, and enhance accessibility, with a focus on engaging individuals in vulnerable situations, particularly youth, older people, persons with disabilities and individuals with special needs. Applicants should have the flexibility to select their preferred application areas.

Pilots should aim at leveraging AI for facilitating new revenue streams for the CCSI, as well as sustainable business models, and will highlight marketable solutions.

Financial support to third parties may be foreseen, with the aim of engaging entities external to the consortium in the development of pilots.

Consortia should include representatives of the cultural and creative sectors and industries and technology developers.

Proposals should consider relevant policy initiatives, such as the AI Continent Action Plan^[2], and build upon existing research and innovation outcomes, particularly insights and resources from Horizon Europe-funded projects focused on digital transformation, innovation, or competitiveness in the CCSI, and science-technology-art collaboration, and should liaise with the EIT KIC Culture and Creativity. Whenever relevant, they might make use of existing facilities and platforms such as the European High-Performance-Computing network, the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH), the Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage, ALT EDIC and other data spaces, European Digital Innovation Hubs, AI Factories, and relevant research infrastructures.

[1] “CCSI relate to all sectors and industries whose activities are based on cultural values, cultural diversity and individual and/or collective artistic and other creative expressions, whether those activities are market or non-market oriented, whatever the type of structure that carries them out, and irrespective of how that structure is financed. Those activities include the development of skills and talent with the potential to generate innovation, the creation of wealth and jobs through the production of social and economic value, including from intellectual property management. Those activities relate also to the development, the production, the creation, the dissemination and the preservation of goods and services which embody cultural, artistic or other creative expressions, as well as related functions such as education and management. The cultural and creative sectors include, inter alia, architecture, archives, the arts, libraries and museums, artistic crafts, audiovisual (including film, television, software, video games, multimedia and recorded music), tangible and intangible cultural heritage, design, creativity-driven high-end industries and fashion, festivals, music, literature, performing arts (including theatre and dance), books and publishing (newspapers and magazines), radio and visual arts, and advertising” Decision (EU) 2021/820 of 20 May 2021 on the Strategic Innovation Agenda of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) 2021-2027: Boosting the Innovation Talent and Capacity of Europe and repealing Decision No 1312/2013/EU, Appendix I, footnote nr. 26.

[2] Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions” AI Continent Action Plan” COM (2025) 165 final https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/ai-continent-action-plan. Under the umbrella of the AI Continent Action Plan, the Apply AI strategy aims at boosting the use of AI in EU strategic industries, including the cultural and creative sectors. The AI Continent Action Plan also announces the preparation of a dedicated AI strategy for the cultural and creative sectors focused on ensuring that AI enables and reinforces human creativity and that it contributes to safeguarding European cultural and linguistic diversity.