Artificial Intelligence (AI), one of the fastest-growing technologies in recent years, has the potential to play a mission-driven role in cities’ climate action plans. The AI4Cities project aims to harness this potential by bringing together leading European cities looking for energy and mobility solutions to reduce GHG emissions and support their climate action commitments towards carbon neutrality. Helsinki (Finland), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Copenhagen (Denmark), Paris region (France), Stavanger (Norway) and Tallinn (Estonia) are the six European cities and regions involved in this project.

In AI4Cities, these six cities will go through a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) process. PCP is an innovation procurement tool to stimulate market innovation as it enables the public sector to steer the development of new solutions directly towards its needs.

In this context, the six cities will define the needs and requirements of the energy and mobility solutions to be developed, and challenge start-ups, SMEs and companies to design innovative solutions applying the use of AI and related enabling digital technologies, such as 5G, Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and big data applications.

The AI4Cities project is divided into five main phases (0-4): one preparatory phase (0), three standard PCP phases (1 – solutions design, 2 – prototype phase, and 3 – prototype testing phase) and one final impact assessment and follow up phase (4). A group of follower cities will be recruited throughout the project to enhance the market uptake of the developed solutions.

Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) falls under pre-commercial procurement. It enables public bodies to purchase research to stimulate innovation, when goods or services are currently not available in the marketplace. SBIR helps the public sector to address identified ‘Challenges’ that impact the citizen. On the supplier side SBIR is particularly suited to small and medium-sized business, as contracts are of relatively low value and operate in short timescales

UrbanWINS aims to develop and test methods for designing and implementing strategic plans for waste prevention and management. Cities involved will enhance urban environmental resilience and shift towards sustainable production and consumption.

Environmental NGOs have knowledge and experience with many of the environmental issues addressed by GPP criteria, such as hazardous substances, waste management, energy efficiency etc, and therefore represent vital stakeholders when promoting GPP. The objective of the NGO Network is to increase the uptake of GPP through the EU by building NGO capacity to support public authorities.

Topten is a consumer-oriented online search tool, which presents the best appliances in various categories of products. The key criteria are energy efficiency, impact on the environment, health and quality.

The STA project aims to provide guidance for public authorities on how to procure sustainable and fairly traded timber. It will also develop a dual model for timber suppliers on how to integrate fair trade and sustainable forest management certification.

The objective of iNSPiRe is to tackle the problem of high-energy consumption by producing systemic renovation packages that can be applied to residential and tertiary buildings. The renovation packages developed by iNSPiRe aim to reduce the primary energy consumption of a building to lower than 50 kWh/m2/year. The packages need to be suitable to a variety of climates while ensuring optimum comfort for the building users.

PROBIS aims to use PPI in the building sector, with a focus on energy-efficient refurbishment of existing buildings. Four tenders will be launched on building technologies (ICT, envelope and energy equipment) before being tested in four pilot buildings in Torino (IT), Miskolc (HU), Börlange (SE) and in the Lombardy Region (IT).

The project brings together ten partners from five EU Member States to establish the conditions for health institutions throughout Europe to collaborate in the purchase of innovative health products, services and solutions to promote "ageing well".