Connecting Europe's AI ecosystem for smarter cities
Testing facilities, innovation hubs, AI Factories and cybersecurity projects showed how a connected user journey can help AI solutions move from the lab to the street, at a joint DEDEP.eu and CoordinaTEF webinar.
AI, IoT and smart mobility are changing how citizens move through cities and how public services are delivered. The Digital Europe Programme has invested heavily in Testing and Experimentation Facilities (TEFs), European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIHs) and AI infrastructure. The question is how to turn that potential into real, trustworthy benefits. After editions on agrifood and health, the third webinar in this thematic series turned to smart cities.
The event was co-organised by DEDEP.eu, which supports dissemination and exploitation across the programme; CoordinaTEF, which aligns the four sectoral TEFs; and the support action for the EDIH network. More than 60 participants joined, including SMEs, policymakers, technology providers and city authorities. A public panel was followed by an interactive workshop for EU-funded projects.
Mark Smitham, Policy Officer at the European Commission's AI Office (DG CONNECT), set the scene. Under the Apply AI Strategy, the public sector is a strategic sector for AI, with a focus on more liveable cities and major societal challenges such as wildfires and floods. EDIHs stimulate innovation, TEFs test it in live environments, and AI Factories help algorithms scale. A further piece of the puzzle is the LDT CitiVERSE EDIC, a European Digital Infrastructure Consortium for local digital twins with participants from 15 Member States. Solutions must adapt to Europe's diversity, including federal and regional administrations, and to a new multiannual funding framework. "Nobody can address AI and major societal challenges alone," he concluded, quoting Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen.
Four building blocks of the journey
CitCom.ai: testing AI in real cities. Thomas De Meester, Innovation Manager at imec and lead of the CitCom.ai TEF, explained that an AI solution that works in the lab may fail amid real infrastructure, users and regulation. CitCom.ai brings together 32 partners in 11 Member States, combining research organisations, cities, public agencies and companies. It mainly supports solutions at TRL 6 to 8 with real testing environments, such as mobility systems, digital twins, IoT and connected buildings. Experts in AI, urban innovation, cybersecurity and regulation help design tests, and subsidised access lowers the barrier for start-ups and SMEs. Europe's support landscape is rich, he noted, but users should not have to become experts in it. Initiatives must connect around a "connected journey" through referrals, and success should be measured by outcomes, not by which instrument delivered them.
InnDIH: the regional entry point. David Gil Sanz, of the coordination team of InnDIH, the EDIH for the Valencia region, described a hub focused on AI, the technology most in demand among its clients. In its first phase it delivered 986 services to 612 companies, nearly half of them AI-based, helping them raise more than €4 million in additional investment. InnDIH works with Spain's AI Factories and AI regulatory sandboxes, and runs a two-way referral mechanism with CitCom.ai's Valencia node: companies ready for urban testing go to the TEF, while those at an earlier stage come to the EDIH. A joint use case on privacy-preserving acoustic monitoring, which detects traffic, sirens and construction noise, was successfully validated in real urban settings.
Sweden AI Factory: compute, skills and handovers. Petra Dalunde, Head of AI Ecosystem and Policy at the Sweden AI Factory (RISE), presented a network of 19 AI Factories and 13 antennas, with SMEs and start-ups as priority users. The Swedish factory offers hands-on guidance, access to EuroHPC supercomputers, training, hackathons and roadshows, trustworthy-AI services, data and a co-working space. It has served 140 customers, with 300 more in the pipeline, most building products on large language models or agentic AI. Requests outside its focus areas go to the AI Factory best placed to help. Less mature companies are handed to EDIHs, and those needing real-world testing to TEFs.
PiQASO: quantum-safe smart cities. Savvoula Oikonomou, PiQASO coordinator at UBITECH, presented a project funded through the European Cybersecurity Competence Centre, with 25 organisations in 12 countries. It is developing post-quantum cryptography tools, including a software library, a hardware module for low-end devices and a cloud service. Use cases relevant to cities include secure messages for emergency-vehicle priority at traffic lights, smart-grid telemetry and railway drone inspections. Threats such as "harvest now, decrypt later" are real, and some estimates now place the quantum threat around 2029–2030. Solutions are expected to be validated for deployment by mid-2027, with a migration toolkit for cities.
Panel discussion: from experiment to scale
The panel, moderated by Nick Ferguson of Trust-IT Services, explored how organisations can move smoothly between instruments. Petra Dalunde said it would be ideal if every initiative published its services in one shared place, so that anyone could search them and refer customers. Until then, regular meetings and personal contacts remain the best way to hand companies over. A participant echoed the call for a single entry point, perhaps a decision tree, to help SMEs find their own path.
On turning a successful test into deployment at scale, Thomas De Meester said there is no one-size-fits-all answer, but several ingredients help:
- validating that a solution solves a real problem in the context where cities actually operate, including procurement rules, budgets, governance and political priorities
- preparing for interoperability with existing systems, data platforms and processes
- building trust among officials and citizens that a solution is reliable, transparent and valuable
- demonstrating compliance with the AI Act as a prerequisite for deployment, not an afterthought
- Sharing success stories from each experiment, he added, gives visibility to innovators and builds confidence for the next city.
David Gil Sanz described EDIHs as the trusted entry point closest to companies. They assess a company's maturity and goals and build an innovation roadmap. They then provide services directly, refer the company to a TEF for real-world validation, or to an AI Factory for large-scale compute and advanced expertise. Crucially, EDIHs stay involved afterwards, with training, funding opportunities and scaling support.
Finally, Savvoula Oikonomou reminded cities that digital infrastructure is often meant to last 20 to 25 years. Cybersecurity must therefore be built in from the pilot stage, with tools that can be updated as threats, including quantum ones, evolve.
From discussion to collaboration
In the interactive workshop, led by Gabriele Quattrocchi of DEDEP.eu, Digital Europe projects mapped their offer, the blockers that keep adopters away and how they promote their services. As in the agrifood and health editions, recurring themes emerged:
- understanding which service fits a customer remains a key barrier, together with co-funding requirements and administrative burden
- joint events, clear referrals, open calls and storytelling about results are among the most effective ways to reach adopters
- EDIHs, TEFs and AI Factories in the same territory want to run joint events and services, and to document customer journeys from EDIH to TEF to AI Factory
- a single entry point, a unified customer journey, regular coordination and reciprocity, such as simply inviting each other to events
- structured partnership and collaboration tasks within Digital Europe projects, so knowledge of the ecosystem does not rest with a few people
These insights will feed into recommendations from DEDEP.eu and CoordinaTEF for decision-makers. Both support actions are ready to help projects turn ideas into joint webinars, workshops or sessions at events already planned, building on cross-programme workshops held for the agrifood sector. As Thomas De Meester put it, the goal is a connected journey where every entry point leads to the right support at the right moment.
The recording and presentations from the public session will be available on the DEDEP.eu and CoordinaTEF websites.
