Turin, 20 February 2026 – OGR Torino. “AI is the new dynamo.” Fabio Pammolli said it while speaking at Officine d’Intelligenza – 1st National Forum on Artificial Intelligence for Industry, in the session titled “AI4I – Mission, Strategic Plan, Activities”, during the first public presentation of the AI4I Strategic Plan 2026–2030.
The sentence established the intellectual backbone of the day.
Officine d’Intelligenza, promoted by the Istituto Italiano di Intelligenza Artificiale (AI4I), OGR Torino and Fondazione CRT, convened national institutions, industry leaders, scientific authorities and financial actors to examine how Artificial Intelligence is reshaping value chains, production models, corporate governance and public policy frameworks. Within that architecture, Pammolli’s intervention defined the strategic grammar of the Institute.
From GPT to the Dynamo: Reframing Artificial Intelligence
Pammolli opened by acknowledging the institutional weight surrounding the Forum. Messages from national ministers, regional authorities and foundations signalled expectations aligned with the country’s development trajectory.
That responsibility, he argued, requires conceptual clarity.
“We should not think of AI as a trend linked to GPT or large language models. We thought of AI as the equivalent of what the dynamo represented in previous industrial revolutions.”
The analogy situates Artificial Intelligence among enabling infrastructures. The dynamo reorganised energy systems and industrial production; AI reorganises information systems and decision processes. Signals collected across heterogeneous environments are structured, processed and translated into decisions. Decisions become operational actions inside industrial systems.
The shift unfolds at systemic scale.
Choosing Where to Compete
AI4I was established in July 2024 with a defined mandate: bring Artificial Intelligence as close as possible to industrial deployment.
Italy’s productive system, characterised by a long tail of small and medium-sized enterprises, requires strategic selectivity. Industrial impact depends on positioning in vertical domains where scientific competence, engineering capacity and market demand intersect.
“Choosing functional niches is a matter of existence. It is how we remain relevant for the industrial system.”
The objective is depth with applicability. Strategic focus becomes the condition for industrial relevance.
Research, Development, Engineering — Repeated “Almost Obsessively”
At the core of AI4I stands a network of laboratories structured around three words that Pammolli repeated “almost obsessively”: research, development, engineering.
This sequence defines method.
Research is oriented toward application. Development prepares integration. Engineering ensures deployability. The laboratories operate as small, agile units led by young principal investigators with entrepreneurial responsibility for their programmes. Each unit receives a starting grant and builds a team around defined objectives, including measurable delivery targets.
“Talent attracts talent.”
Mass criticality emerges from density of excellence. The structure is flat, portfolio-based and designed to distribute risk across multiple initiatives. Scientific ambition is aligned with industrial execution.
Building the Machine Before Showing the Results
Pammolli devoted attention to institutional architecture: governance, administrative capacity, internal rules and incentive systems.
AI4I partnered with the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia to rely on an already operational administrative framework, accelerating execution and ensuring structural solidity. Researchers enter structured agreements tied to commitments and delivery outcomes. Strategic planning connects directly to operational programming. A Committee for Good Practices supports oversight and responsibility.
Institutional credibility underpins industrial trust.
The Foundry: Computational Capacity as Industrial Infrastructure
In the AI era, infrastructure includes computing power.
AI4I’s Foundry — hosted in Turin following a competitive procurement process — provides training and inference capacity for internal laboratories and for companies developing their own models. The initiative incorporates expertise repatriated from leading European supercomputing environments and serves both advanced research and industrial experimentation.
The platform functions as an enabling layer within the industrial ecosystem, lowering barriers to experimentation and accelerating deployment.
IAS “Peano”: Foundational Depth
Alongside industrial deployment, AI4I launched its Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), supported by Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo.
The IAS concentrates on foundational challenges in mathematics and theoretical computer science that underpin long-term competitiveness in AI. The name “Peano” refers to Giuseppe Peano and to the Peano axioms formalising arithmetic on the natural numbers. Peano arithmetic constitutes one of the formal systems addressed by Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, which demonstrate that any consistent formal system capable of expressing elementary arithmetic contains true statements that cannot be proven within that system.
The reference signals continuity between foundational mathematical logic and contemporary computational systems. Foundational research strengthens industrial resilience.
SUK: Structuring the Market
Italy’s AI ecosystem features fragmentation on both the supply and demand sides. Numerous small technology providers coexist with a wide base of potential industrial adopters.
SUK was conceived as a curated marketplace hosting more than one hundred AI-related solutions. AI4I facilitates structured encounters between companies seeking adoption and providers offering solutions.
“We are facilitators of the encounter between demand and supply.”
Initial matchmaking sessions are already underway. The objective is autonomous industrial transactions following structured alignment.
Wiring the Productive System
Officine d’Intelligenza hosted the first public presentation of AI4I’s Strategic Plan 2026–2030. Pammolli framed that Plan as an operational doctrine: align scientific research with engineering translation; align computing infrastructure with industrial accessibility; align foundational depth with applied urgency.
Artificial Intelligence, in this vision, functions as a systemic capability reshaping industrial structures.
“AI is the new dynamo.”
Wiring that dynamo into the productive system requires architecture, governance and execution.
