The Danish National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence

AI offers great opportunities for creating growth, prosperity, and world-class public services in the public sector. Therefore, the Danish National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence seeks to create a framework for businesses, researchers, and public authorities to enable them to better exploit the potential of AI with a high level of responsibility.

The strategy puts forth four objectives for the Danish development and use of AI:

1. Denmark should have a common ethical and human-centred basis for AI
2. Danish researchers should research and develop AI
3. Danish businesses should achieve growth through developing and using AI
4. The public sector should use AI to offer world-class public services

Potentials and Challenges

Thanks to a long-standing focus on digital technology and solutions in both the public and private sectors, Denmark has a good starting point for using new technologies: high-quality and structured public data sets, a flexible labour market, and a population adaptable and open to new technologies.

However, the use of AI also poses a number of challenges. For instance, AI raises a number of ethical concerns regarding openness and transparency, as the technology allows for new ways of decision-making. The development and use of artificial intelligence also require access to specialised labour – and those skills are in great demand in society generally.

Danish is a small language area, and this challenges the development of solutions based on AI using speech recognition and language understanding in Danish. These are challenges that the strategy attempts to address.

Initiatives of the Strategy

The strategy's initiatives fall within four focus areas that will help ensure that the work to increase the uptake of AI is done ethically, with access to good data, strong skills and new knowledge, and that the possibilities for investments in technology are improving.

In order to boost the work on AI in Denmark and gain more experience with the technology, specific objectives are also formulated in four priority areas: health, energy and utilities, agriculture, and transport.

The strategy contains 24 initiatives that cover the public and private sectors. The strategy allocates DKK 60 million for new initiatives. For instance, a number of public-sector signature AI projects are carried out in cooperation with municipalities, regions, and private companies.

AI is a technology undergoing rapid development, and therefore the strategy is revisited at regular intervals, so efforts can be adapted and new ones can come into play.