BRUSSELS – 25 April 2018 - BSA | The Software Alliance, whose members are at the forefront of global cutting-edge artificial intelligence (“AI”) powered technologies, welcomes the European Commission’s AI strategy as a positive step towards supporting AI innovation and its responsible use in the EU.

The strategy correctly identifies some important issues aimed at boosting the deployment of AI related technologies, such as increased R&D funding and the promotion of AI powered projects as well as opening public sector information for analysis; we encourage the Commission and the other EU Institutions to be more ambitious in the Strategy by emphasizing further several issues that are crucial for tapping into the tremendous potential benefits of AI. Addressing concerns over ethics and liability is only one facet of the development of a regulatory framework to support AI innovation. The Strategy should also highlight the importance of issues that are currently being debated in the EU, such as ensuring transfers of data (within and outside Europe), to allow companies large and small to use analytics on data sets to which they have lawful access.

Particularly, the strategy should support the crucial role that Text and Data Mining (TDM) plays in AI. TDM is the building block for deep learning and without access to data, AI is not possible. “If the EU wants to take full advantage of the benefits that AI is expected to bring to its economy and across all Member States, it must free up data for machine learning by removing the limitations on TDM currently found in the Copyright Directive for entities that have lawful access to the content”, comments Thomas Boué, Director General of Policy- EMEA.

BSA supports all efforts to create a policy approach that promotes the development and adoption of cutting-edge technologies and looks forward to working with all institutions to make the EU a great hub of AI innovation and development.