Europe’s AI strategy has evolved from principle to practice. With the Apply AI Strategy, the European Union is turning its long-standing commitment to trustworthy, human-centric AI into tangible innovation, competitiveness, and societal benefit. At the heart of this transformation are the Testing and Experimentation Facilities (TEFs) — four sectorial flagships that bridge Europe’s research excellence and its industrial base.
The TEFs agrifoodTEF, AI MATTERS, CitCom.ai and TEF-Health — are not research projects or marketing showcases. They are strategic European infrastructures that make AI and robotics adoption faster, safer, and more scalable across key sectors where Europe must lead: agriculture and food systems, manufacturing, smart cities, and health.
Accelerating Europe’s “AI Made in Europe” Vision
Europe’s AI ecosystem is rich in talent and scientific excellence, yet the translation of this excellence into widespread industrial uptake remains a challenge. According to Eurostat, just 13.5% of EU SMEs and mid-cap enterprises reported using AI technologies in 2024 — a rapid increase, but still evidence that innovation often stalls before reaching the market.
The Apply AI Strategy recognises this gap and focuses on creating the conditions to boost innovation, strengthen competitiveness, and unlock societal benefit. TEFs are one of its key delivery mechanisms: they provide companies — especially SMEs — with the infrastructure, data, regulatory clarity and expert support they need to move from idea to validated solution.
Turning Research into Real-World Readiness
TEFs operate where capability, context, and compliance meet. They help innovators test, validate, and demonstrate AI systems in real operational environments — from farms and factories to hospitals and city districts. Rather than offering abstract advice, TEFs deliver practical support in four core areas:
- Infrastructure and environments: Real and virtual testing grounds where AI systems are exposed to real-world constraints such as latency, safety, and interoperability.
- Data and interoperability: Access to representative datasets and secure sharing methods that enable cross-sector model validation.
- Regulatory and ethical guidance: Built-in compliance testing aligned with the AI Act, European standards and sector regulations.
- Business acceleration: Supported trials, mentoring, and links to supply chains and public procurers that help SMEs convert pilots into market-ready products.
This integrated model turns proof-of-concept into proof-of-value, de-risking AI adoption for European businesses.
What’s in it for Businesses and SMEs
For SMEs and startups, the TEFs represent Europe’s most practical gateway to AI adoption. Through shared facilities and expert guidance, companies can validate solutions against real operational and regulatory benchmarks — without bearing the full cost of compliance or infrastructure.
By testing their products in TEFs, businesses gain:
- Credibility through conformity with EU standards;
- Speed to market through early-stage validation;
- Visibility and legitimacy with investors, partners, and customers;
- Connections to research institutions, industrial players, and public buyers.
In short, TEFs enable SMEs to innovate with confidence — in line with Europe’s standards and values.
What each TEF brings to the table
• agrifoodTEF — smarter, sustainable food systems. AgrifoodTEF runs a distributed network of testing infrastructures that let agri-tech providers trial robotics, remote sensing, decision-support and yield-optimisation systems in real farms and food-processing contexts. Its focus is explicitly practical: help farmers and food companies adopt precision agriculture and sustainability practices while validating resilience, interoperability and environmental benefits before market entry. For a sector dependent on seasonal cycles and complex supply chains, that kind of near-product validation is invaluable.
• AI MATTERS EU — manufacturing and robotics at scale. AI MATTERS provides a manufacturing-centric TEF where automation, human-robot collaboration, predictive maintenance and circular-economy use cases can be stress-tested using factory-grade equipment and real operational data. Through modular services (covering areas like human-robot interaction, factory optimisation and circular workflows), AI MATTERS helps industrial innovators demonstrate safety, productivity gains and integration with legacy systems, a necessary step for factories that cannot tolerate wide-scale disruption.
• CitCom.ai — cities, mobility and public services. CitCom.ai opens physical and virtual urban testbeds so cities, mobility providers and civic tech SMEs can evaluate AI solutions for traffic management, public-service automation, energy optimisation and tourism at scale. The TEF’s city partners, living labs and cross-national nodes expose algorithms to diverse regulatory regimes, user behaviours and infrastructural constraints – strengthening robustness and civic acceptability before roll-out. For municipal procurers and startups alike, that variety of contexts speeds learning and procurement confidence.
• TEF-Health – trustworthy AI in care and diagnostics. TEF-Health focuses on clinical validation, safety, and interoperability for AI and robotic systems used in patient care, diagnostics and clinical workflows. The TEF emphasises ethical safeguards, data governance and medical-device pathways, supporting the transition from lab models to clinically useful tools that clinicians and patients can rely on. In short: it builds the evidentiary and regulatory bridge that health-sector adopters demand.
A Connected European Accelerator
Together, the TEFs form an integrated European ecosystem for applied AI. Their distributed network of nodes and shared methodologies allow knowledge, tools and standards to flow across sectors. A safety framework tested in TEF-Health can inform industrial robotics validation in AI MATTERS; data-governance models from CitCom.ai can be reused in AgrifoodTEF.
This horizontal exchange creates a federated innovation infrastructure that strengthens Europe’s position as the AI continent — one that drives competitiveness through responsible, trustworthy and high-impact innovation.
Responsible Competitiveness: Europe’s Edge
The TEFs embody Europe’s distinctive approach to AI: innovate boldly, deploy responsibly. By embedding ethics, transparency, and regulatory assurance into the innovation cycle, the TEFs make it easier for businesses to bring AI to market in ways that are both profitable and aligned with European values.
If Europe maintains this pragmatic coupling of regulation and deployment, the TEFs will be remembered as the places where Europe’s Apply AI Strategy became real — where ideas became impact, and where trustworthy AI turned into tangible economic and societal value.
To find out more about the services the TEFs offer that can help your Business:
Catalogue of Services agrifoodTEF
Catalogue of Services TEF-Health
