Italian w(AI)ve-like trends
Last summer Confindustria, the main association representing manufacturing and service companies in Italy, published a thorough wide-ranging report on the state of art of Artificial Intelligence adoption by Italian companies. The document aims at analysing the current situation of development and potential impact of enabling technologies within a broader spectrum of traditional “languages” and methodologies.
Is AI a thing?
As a matter of fact, notwithstanding the conceptualization of Artificial Intelligence can be traced back in 1950s-1960s, it is only in the last couple of years that the LLM’s (large language models) are considerably influencing the way users and industries perform. It is just in the most recent times, in fact, that Big Data and Cloud systems, as well as massive electronic communication networks and deeply-digital tools, have set the floor for an upscale of AI improvement and application. The potential of growth of AI lays within its capacity of replacing repetitive tasks and activities, as well as condensing large amount of data and information with a predictive result on the base of the instructions and models given. Still, this capacity and the accuracy of products largely depend on the preciseness of commands prearranged and on the punctuality of information available.
Additionally, in order to frame a cohesive picture about the current situation, it is always useful to remember that AI is a comprehensive term encompassing diverse technologies and systems, whereby the effective surveys need to be placed within sectorial fragmentations in order to have a punctual picture.
Str(AI)tegic applications
Basing the findings on ISTAT data, the report shows that over the last years AI has proven increasingly strategic for R&D and innovation, administrative processes, marketing, and sales, while its impact appears to be diminishing in production processes, logistics, ICT security, and accounting and control (Figure 1).
Source: https://www.confindustria.it/documenti/lintelligenza-artificiale-per-il-sistema-italia-report-2025/
Thanks to the analysis of 241 case-studies from 76 companies, the report can vertically explore how ai is now shaping the work and its social value. The investigation has targeted several sectors, such as Health & Life Sciences, Manufacturing, (Sustainable) Mobility, Public Administration and Tourism, finding that AI is applied with functions related to Operations, Human Resources and Corporate services, Maintenance, Customer Service, Research and Development, Sales and Marketing, Finance and Purchasing and Quality Control. Reading through the thorough telling of the diverse cases, it appears clear the Italian companies (99,3% of which are SMEs) have largely adopted generative AI models in order to personalize their finalities.
Within this scenario, it is fundamental that companies and industries are accompanied to understand AI and its functioning, its possible usages and implications, from the basis concerning the quantity and quality of data-set as well as the consequences it may have on the workforce and on their daily workload. Initiatives and projects such as SMART can surely have an impact on how industry understand and embrace new technologies, as well as on how people adopt and adapt to them.
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