“A prova di AI” is IT4LIA AI Factory’s podcast about how artificial intelligence is actually applied inside Italian organisations. Every episode, a real case: a concrete challenge, the decisions made along the way and the results achieved.
In each episode, entrepreneurs, decision makers, institutional representatives and innovators share their challenges, objectives and choices with the support of the IT4LIA AI Factory network.
The first episode: ISTAT
To open the season, we chose one of the most significant — and in many ways most unexpected — cases: ISTAT, Italy’s National Institute of Statistics.
How do you take AI to the next level in a public organisation of this scale? What are the concrete problems to solve, the risks to govern, the results to measure? And above all: where do you begin?
These are the questions explored with Massimo Fedeli, Director of the Department for the Development of Methods and Technologies for the Production and Dissemination of Statistical Information at ISTAT, and Lucia Floresta, Education Manager at the ICSC National Research Centre — who closely followed the training programme developed with IT4LIA AI Factory.
The starting point: training
The first step ISTAT took with IT4LIA AI Factory was not to develop a project. It was to train its people.
Around 40 researchers followed a tailored programme — not a standard AI course, but a curriculum built around the concrete use cases ISTAT was already working on. The goal was straightforward: to make them autonomous in using HPC infrastructure and developing AI solutions, so they could independently drive forward the projects already in the pipeline.
The team that was trained is not diverse by chance: it includes domain experts — specialists in the statistical subject matter who benefit directly from the solution — methodologists, who provide the framework and approach, and IT professionals, who supply the technical tools. These are the same three pillars that have always produced ISTAT’s official statistics, now brought into the new context of artificial intelligence.
Not training for its own sake, but the essential first operational step of projects already approved and in the implementation phase.
Projects underway
From the automatic classification of high-resolution aerial images of the territory, to the analysis of products sold online, to the automatic generation of semantic metadata for datasets: ISTAT currently has three projects underway with IT4LIA AI Factory, each addressing a concrete operational challenge. The details, the starting problems and the current state of progress are all in the episode.
Listen to the episode now
“A prova di AI” is available on YouTube and Spotify — listen to the first episode now.
Do you have a case to share or want to understand how IT4LIA AI Factory can support your project? Find out what we can do for you.
