(Yicai Global) August 24 -- A report by Finland's economic affairs ministry on the national AI program offers insights into the Finnish take on AI and its link with healthtech.

Finland, long an AI frontrunner, was among the first countries to launch a national AI-strategy in 2017 to ensure its human-centric introduction, while ensuring competitiveness and economic growth, The Yuan, an AI-centric open community whose avowed mission is to put the 'All-Inclusive' into AI, reported on June 30.

Finland counts a human-centric approach to AI among its strengths. The country's economic affairs minister appointed a steering group led by the vice board chair of Finnish tech titan KONE to draft a national plan to power up AI. Styled Artificial Intelligence 4.0. and announced in November, it comprises members from organizations, and small and medium enterprises, as well as bigger players.

It seeks industrial change via data-driven growth amid a wider economic, technological and social shift: the Fourth Industrial Revolution, per the plan The Yuan cited.

AI is one technology oiling this new revolution. Others are fifth-generation and sixth-generation wireless networks and the Internet of Things, among others.

Finland will build a trust-based data economy and encourage AI-based digitization, per The Yuan report. The country will use human-centric AI to become a pioneer in sustainable digital transformation.

The report outlines ways Finnish companies may and must take advantage of AI. One example is a healthtech SME with loads of data, with AI forming the core issue analyzed. The company makes plastic components for the health sector. Asia is its key market, followed by Europe and the Americas.

Reams of monitoring data are generated as the firm monitors its product deliveries, prompting the question of how to use them. To improve its product quality via AI use is of great interest to the firm, which is developing real-time and transparent orders and deliveries that allow it to leverage this information.

According to an optimistic scenario for this hypothetical company, it stands to gain a major sales boost from the technology in coming years after its personnel form relationships with higher education institutions, whose scientists reveal how to recognize future technologies and the business opportunities they bring. The firm draws up a digital strategy with training that gears its workforce for AI.

This is how AI is seen in Finland. Though Chinese companies lead the race now, much is also going on elsewhere. This brings opportunities for cooperation, especially for Finnish firms in healthtech eyeing opportunities in China.

Editor: Kim Taylor

Yicai Global is pleased to announce its cooperation with The Yuan () and looks forward to future feature articles from it authored by luminaries of the ilk of Hippo. AI founder Bart de Witte and the many other leading lights in the AI sector who are its regular contributors. The Yuan provides an open community with the aim of averting the emergence of bias and social inequities and inequalities arising from uneven access to AI and, as such, its philosophy closely aligns with Yicai Global's own stance.