Spain’s 2024 Artificial Intelligence Strategy

The 2024 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy is a blueprint designed to position Spain at the forefront of the global AI revolution. The strategy sets the foundation for harnessing AI’s full potential while addressing the ethical, social, and regulatory challenges it presents. Published by the Spanish government, this strategy reflects a proactive response to the fast-paced development of AI technologies and the need to accelerate national initiatives, ensuring Spain remains competitive and prepared for the digital future.

The strategy builds on Spain’s existing strengths in AI research, data processing, and supercomputing and aligns with European Union regulations on AI. It aims to boost AI adoption across public and private sectors, promote ethical AI practices, and ensure that Spain is a leader in AI-driven innovation on the global stage.

The strategy’s objective

At its core, the 2024 AI Strategy is designed to ensure that AI development and deployment in Spain are responsible, transparent, and centred on humanistic values. The strategy aims to:

• Boost Spain’s AI capabilities, particularly in supercomputing and language models.
• Ensure AI benefits are shared broadly across all sectors of society.
• Position Spain as a leader in AI-driven innovations that are ethical, sustainable, and transparent.

Three pillars of the strategy

The strategy is built around three key pillars, each critical to the responsible development and integration of AI in Spain:

1. Reinforcing key levers to develop AI: This pillar focuses on strengthening the essential infrastructure needed for AI, including supercomputing, data storage, and language model development. It emphasises the creation of high-quality AI models that support public infrastructure, ensuring Spain has the capacity to develop advanced AI technologies at a competitive level.
2. Facilitating the expansion of AI in public and private sectors: This pillar is designed to accelerate AI adoption across all sectors, with a particular focus on small and medium-sised enterprises (SMEs). The goal is to democratise AI technologies, making them accessible to businesses of all sises while fostering innovation and entrepreneurship. It also emphasises the role of AI in improving public services and governance.
3. Developing transparent, responsible, and humanistic AI: Ensuring that AI is ethically developed and responsibly deployed is the cornerstone of this pillar. It focuses on establishing strong regulatory frameworks, promoting transparency in AI decision-making, and creating a broad social consensus around the use of AI. The Spanish Agency for the Supervision of Artificial Intelligence (AESIA) will play a key role in monitoring and ensuring that AI systems align with ethical and legal standards.