On 22 May 2025, the second stakeholder workshop took place at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology as part of the FFG lighthouse project FAIR-AI. The aim of the project is to bundle results, guidelines and recommendations for a trustworthy AI future and to make the tools developed available via a publicly accessible platform. This should provide the AI community with a supportive toolset with practical instructions that will make it easier to adapt to new regulations and strengthen their competitiveness in the long term. The theme of the workshop was ‘Thinking Futures - Scenarios for Trustworthy AI’ and brought together a diverse group of stakeholders from academia, business, the public sector, education and civil society.
Insights into the programme
After the welcome address by Alexander Schindler (Project Manager FAIR-AI, AIT), Andrea Kasztler (AIT) introduced the methodology of the scenario process and presented central key factors that influence the future development of AI.
The participants then developed different future forms of these factors in interactive working groups. The focus was on questions such as:
- What could the respective key factors look like in 20 years' time?
- What interactions result from different factors?
- What images of the future can emerge from this?
Keynote on trustworthy AI
Peter Biegelbauer (AIT) gave a keynote entitled ‘Trustworthy AI - more than just a buzzword?’ In his presentation, he highlighted social, political and technological requirements for trustworthy AI - and emphasised the importance of transparent, comprehensible and inclusive AI systems as well as global challenges in this context.
Joint results and outlook
In the afternoon, the focus was on consolidating the group work and developing consistent scenarios with the help of the ‘morphological box’. The workshop concluded with a reflection on the findings and a look ahead to the third FAIR-AI stakeholder workshop, in which the scenarios developed will be explored in greater depth and concrete opportunities, challenges and measures in the here and now will be derived in the form of a backcast.
FAIR-AI pursues an inclusive and future-oriented approach in order to lay the foundations for safe, ethical and human-centred AI development in Austria.
More information about the project: https://fair-ai.at/
