Trustworthy AI, built on transparency, ethics, and socio-technical robustness, ensures that transparency, ethics, and socio-technical rigour are not afterthoughts but the foundation of digital sovereignty and sustainable growth.

Julia Palma, from CeADAR, gave a presentation at the EBDVF event, named “The Princess and the Pea-Sized AI”,at the session, “The Princess and the Pea-Sized AI: Building Trustworthy Systems from the Inside Out“. She spoke about MANOLO Use cases scenarios, Z-inspection co-design framework, and the project’s integration approach & mapping.

This session brought together perspectives from regulation, research, industry, and entrepreneurship. From regulators like Coimisiún na Meán, overseeing the Data Services Act and enforcing accountability for global platforms such as OpenAI, Meta, and TikTok, to industrial leaders like Philips, exemplifying Made in Europe innovation grounded in safety and ethics, each actor plays a vital role. 

European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIHs), AI Factories and the AI Office are strengthening cross-sector communication and implementation, ensuring coherence between policy and practice. Meanwhile, universities and SMEs are driving adoption through applied research, open collaboration, and responsible innovation frameworks. With specific examples, we explored how these efforts form a connected ecosystem where technical excellence and ethical integrity reinforce one another, making Trustworthy AI not just a compliance goal, but Europe’s strategic path to long-term competitiveness.

Julia states, “MANOLO is building tools for trustworthy, lighter, high-quality AI models that run efficiently across cloud and edge, validated in close-to-market scenarios with three European companies. Once companies truly understand the value for their users, and how it builds trust and competitiveness, trustworthy AI stops being just a legal requirement: it becomes a real business advantage. We want systems that are transparent, accountable and genuinely valuable. Achieving this requires early collaboration with all stakeholders to understand their needs and push the state of the art to develop systems that best fit these constraints and trade-offs.”