Grants4Companies is an application in the Austrian Business Service Portal, the main point of contact between businesses and Austrian public administration. It uses methods of symbolic AI to display a list of grants, which match the logged-in business based on its data available in the registries of public administration. The internal representation of the grants also enables analysis of the landscape of Austrian business grants.
Name in original language
Grants4Companies – Förderungsvorschläge für mein Unternehmen
Initiative overview
Business grants are an important tool for steering and supporting the economy. In addition, they can be used to quickly react to and counter crises. However, the search for suitable business grants can be a challenge for businesses in Austria, due to the large number of available business grants from a multitude of different providers. While there are dedicated search engines, businesses often are simply not aware of the existence of grants on a specific topic, and hence cannot use these engines in a targeted search. This is the starting point for the application Grants4Companies.Grants4Companies aims to provide a better visibility for business grants by suggesting grants in the context of the Unternehmensserviceportal (USP), supplementing existing dedicated search engines. This is achieved by listing relevant business grants for the company or business logged into the USP. Most importantly, whether a grant is relevant for the particular business is evaluated using methods of symbolic AI based on the data on that business available from the registers of the public administration. The grants for which the business satisfies the formal eligibility criteria, e.g., concerning the location or type of business, are shown more prominently. Of course the data used to evaluate the grants for a particular business is retrieved only after an explicit consent, and is visible only for this specific business. The employed methods of symbolic AI yield a higher transparency and explainability, since the ranking of the business grants is achieved by rule-based and hence explicitly explainable evaluations. These explanations as well as the relevant data are shown explicitly. For more information on the specific grants as well as the actual application process the user is referred to the websites of the funding agencies.The main benefit achieved by Grants4Companies for businesses is the better visibility of relevant and potentially interesting business grants and hence by easier discoverability of funding possibilities. But the employed methods and technologies also yield benefits for political institutions, public administration and funding agencies. In particular, the underlying machine-interpretable description of the business grants can be used in the future for formal and automated analyses of the considered grants, helping, e.g., to discover gaps in funding or multiple funding in the form of overlapping business grants. This was demonstrated in a proof of concept implementation using standardised AI programming languages.Standards are a prerequisite for optimal cross-border cooperation between European Member States, companies and developers. The Austrian government therefore endorses and participates in the development of international standards and reference systems for symbolic AI programming languages such as ISO/IEC 13211-1:1995 (Prolog) which are needed to implement AI services reliably, and to ensure digital sovereignty and vendor independence.
Name of responsible organisation (in English)
Federal Chancellery of Austria, Directorate General for Digitalisation and E-Government
