The European Union's approach to artificial intelligence is distinctive. Where other major powers have prioritised raw capability or speed of deployment, Europe has insisted on a third dimension: trustworthiness.
The AI Act — the world's first comprehensive AI regulation — requires transparency, human oversight and accountability for high-risk AI systems.
28DIGITAL's portfolio of EU-funded AI projects is fully aligned with this vision, spanning foundational research and platform infrastructure through ethical certification, human-machine collaboration, emotional intelligence, and the next generation of GenAI entrepreneurs.
DEPLOY AI is one of Europe's flagship AI initiatives. Backed by €28 million under the Digital Europe Programme and coordinated by Fraunhofer IAIS with 28 partners from 13 countries, it built the AI-On-Demand platform (AIoDP), a vendor-independent platform for trustworthy, European-made AI technologies — reducing dependency on American providers and targeting SMEs and public sector users. In DeployAI, 28DIGITAL plays a central role, bringing its pan-European network to ensure the platform reaches well beyond the research community. Its current components include a Business Navigator of validated European AI companies, a Marketplace for verified AI products, and an Industry Stack with a GenAI Gateway and HPC integration under development. The AIoDP has just launched its first Open Call, offering up to €60,000 to AI Providers to integrate their trustworthy, ethical, and transparent AI products on the platform.
CERTAIN (Certification for Ethical and Regulatory Transparency in Artificial Intelligence) is perhaps the most directly policy-relevant project in this cluster. Launched in January 2025 with 20 consortium partners across ten European countries, CERTAIN focuses on enabling trustworthy and compliant AI systems across the data and AI value chain. It provides guidelines, technical tools, and solutions to support compliance, assess data quality, measure biases, and protect privacy. Through its pilots across sectors such as biometrics, health, energy, human resources, finance and IT, the project contributes to the practical implementation of the AI Act. Within the project, 28DIGITAL leads stakeholder engagement, capacity building, and strategic impact evaluation, supporting adoption and uptake across the ecosystem.
TANGO addresses a different dimension of trustworthiness: not how AI is certified, but how it works alongside humans in high-stakes decisions. Funded with €7 million under Horizon Europe, TANGO develops theoretical foundations and computational frameworks for AI systems that augment rather than replace human judgement — validated in real-world contexts including surgical decision support, credit lending and financial fairness, pregnancy care, and public policy design. Its outputs, including a software ecosystem to be released as an open repository, give it unusual credibility as a replicable blueprint for genuinely human-centric AI.
AI-BOOST (Artificial Intelligence for Better Opportunities and Scientific Progress) advances the state of the art through open innovation competitions co-designed with industry stakeholders — structured challenges that combine funding, infrastructure and community-building to accelerate the development and validation of AI solutions. Its Large AI Grand Challenge, developed in collaboration with the European Commission and EuroHPC, puts European supercomputing infrastructure to work on real-world problems: winning teams from the 2024 edition included Lingua Custodia (AI for financial services), Unbabel and Tilde (multilingual AI technologies), and Textgain (AI for analysing unstructured data and harmful content). By pulling researchers and developers from across the ecosystem into a shared challenge framework, AI-BOOST directly addresses one of European AI's most persistent structural weaknesses: fragmentation.
MANOLO complements this by developing AI systems that are not only trustworthy in their outputs but computationally efficient and deployable across cloud-edge architectures. Its pilots are grounded in physical devices and real environments — robotics in manufacturing and healthcare, smartphones in telecommunications, and wearables in further healthcare applications — with results expected in the final quarter of 2026. The full MANOLO framework is scheduled for release in September 2026, after which it will be open for external testing.
LLM-BRIDGE targets one of the most consequential gaps in the European AI landscape: the continent's lag in generative AI. Rather than addressing this at the research or policy level alone, LLM-BRIDGE works directly with entrepreneurs, supporting the full lifecycle of GenAI startup formation — from initial education and mentoring through to growth — alongside the tools and support structures that early-stage founders need. It is a project built on the understanding that closing Europe's GenAI gap requires not just better models, but a stronger generation of builders. Startups working in Generative AI, LLMs, NLP, and related technologies can apply to join the LLM-BRIDGE Venture Incubation Programme and receive up to €25,000 each. Applications are open until 1 June.
EMAI4EU (EMotion Artificial Intelligence specialists for Europe) trains a new generation of European specialists in emotion AI — systems capable of recognising and responding to human emotional states. The ability to build AI that can read, interpret and appropriately react to human affect is increasingly recognised as a foundational competence, with applications ranging from mental health support tools and adaptive learning platforms to more natural and effective human-computer interaction. By investing in the people who will develop these systems, EMAI4EU addresses a skills gap that is as strategically significant as any gap in research infrastructure.
Finally, 28DIGITAL is also involved in two broader initiatives: the EIT AI Community, which works to embed responsible AI practices across the European innovation ecosystem, and the Women in AI Thematic Working Group within the EDIH network, which seeks to bring more women into AI leadership and break down the structural barriers — in education, entrepreneurship and employment — that have kept them out.
28DIGITAL's AI portfolio is, in a way, a microcosm of Europe's broader strategy: technically ambitious, ethically grounded, and deeply invested in the conditions — platforms, certification, human-machine collaboration, workforce development, and entrepreneurship — that determine whether AI creates shared value or concentrated risk. As the AI Act moves into full implementation, that combination of capability and responsibility will define what it means to do AI the European way.
To learn more or explore collaboration opportunities, visit www.28digital.eu/contact-us
