From tourism to healthcare, Abruzzo's bet

Revitalising inland areas with Ai is the challenge that the Abruzzo Region has taken up with the project "Valleys of Technology", implemented in collaboration with Federmanager. The aim is to use artificial intelligence as a lever for territorial rebalancing, promoting development models capable of strengthening the local production fabric and activating new services for citizens and businesses.

It is a question of exploring new ways of tackling the chronic and unresolved problem of the depopulation of these areas, which are penalised by a demographic decline three times greater than the national average (more than 6% on average compared to 2.2 according to the latest ISTAT data) due to the inconveniences associated with mobility and services. Various solutions have been hypothesised to counter this phenomenon, centred on strengthening essential services and attracting new opportunities, which however often entail unsustainable costs.

In this perspective, the AID is configured as a tool to support the priority areas of the Abruzzo initiative - tourism, digital health and telemedicine, youth and business innovation - with the aim of building a scalable virtuous infrastructure that can be extended to other sectors. The pilot measures for the development and recovery of the Marsican territory, which will involve 17 municipalities and will start by the end of the year, are also geared to the construction of an ecosystem of territorial revitalisation consistent with the funding offered by the NRP, European calls for proposals and regional funds.

The project is part of a broader approach to the topic by the Abruzzo Region, which is also a partner in the national programme promoted by the Department for Digital Transformation, Reg4IA.

Abruzzo's experimentation in the IA Hub for the Pa, led by Puglia, aims to make the preliminary work on calls for proposals more rapid, homogeneous, and reliable. The project led by Luciano Cococcia, responsible for the Digital Transition of the Abruzzo Region, is articulated by four PoCs designed to assist operators in the preliminary investigation phase of the files for the granting of Community and national financing, in particular in the generation and compilation of the checklists, in the extraction of requirements, in the consistency and completeness check of the documents submitted, and in the assistance to businesses and citizens, through a chatbot operating in voice form, for the identification of opportunities and the compilation of all the components of the application.