Evaluation by AI Sweden, 2019-2024

AI Sweden has grown into a national collaboration platform for applied artificial intelligence (AI) since its inception in 2019. The organisation today brings together a large number of partners from business, the public sector and academia, and has the ambition to accelerate the use of AI and strengthen Sweden's position in the field.

Vinnova is one of the initiators of AI Sweden and has been the organisation's single largest contributor since its inception. On behalf of Vinnova, Ramboll has therefore conducted an evaluation of AI Sweden's activities up to and including 2024. The evaluation analyzes how the organisation has developed, to what extent it achieves its objective and what role it plays in the development of the Swedish AI ecosystem.

The evaluation shows, among other things, that:

• AI Sweden has established a strong position in the ecosystem and is perceived as a legitimate and unifying actor for collaboration around applied AI.
• The organisation contributes to new collaborations and initiatives, where partners together develop project, knowledge and infrastructures for AI.
• Larger companies and the public sector experience particular benefit from the expertise and networks built through AI Sweden.
• The needs within the partnership are very diverse, making it challenging to design an offer that creates clear benefits for all types of actors.
• The organisation's scope and funding structure create a certain complexity, which affects how clearly the activities are translated into impacts at the partner organizations.

The report contributes lessons on how national initiatives for applied AI can be organized and developed in a rapidly changing technology and innovation landscape.