L-BEST: Adding Legal and Ethical Services to Manage Digital Innovation Hubs Portfolios in the Artificial Intelligence Domain

The increasing adoption of AI solutions as a key enabler to guarantee the competitiveness of companies and to improve processes has brought the European Commission and Policy Makers to introduce new regulations to guarantee trustworthiness and reliability of Artificial Intelligence solutions. The adoption of new regulations adds a level of complexity to AI providers and users, that very often are not aware of them and/or need additional support, to guarantee the compliancy and respect of laws and ethical principles. To address these requirements, a critical role is played by Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs), that have been already identified as key players for enterprises’ digital transformation and that are expected to help customers also from the legal and ethical perspective. To his regard, the DIH4AI project has switched the taxonomy of the Data-driven Business-Ecosystem-Skills-Technology (D-BEST) reference model, useful for DIHs service portfolio configuration, into the L-BEST, including also the “Legal and Ethical” class. The objective is to provide to DIHs a framework of services to be implemented in short-term and to be offered to SMEs to support the adoption of AI, respecting legal and ethical values.