AI Grant Funding: Supply Chain Demonstrator

Lead organisation

To lead a project your organisation must:

• be a UK registered business of any size, research and technology organisation (RTO) or not for profit
• collaborate with other UK registered organisations
• involve at least two grant claiming micro, small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)
• involve at least two grant claiming large organisations from different BridgeAI target sectors

More information on the different types of organisation can be found in our Funding rules.

Academic institutions cannot lead or work alone.

Project team

To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:

• business of any size
• academic institution
• charity
• not for profit
• public sector organisation
• research and technology organisation (RTO)

Each partner organisation must be invited into the Innovation Funding Service (IFS) by the lead to collaborate on a project. Once partners have accepted the invitation, they will be asked to login or to create an account in IFS. They are responsible for entering their own project costs and completing their Project Impact questions in the application.

To be an eligible collaboration, the lead and at least four other organisations must apply for funding when entering their costs into the application.

Your project must:

• have a total grant funding request of between £1.9 million and £2 million
• last between 14 and 16 months
• carry out all of its project work in the UK
• intend to exploit the results from or in the UK
• start by 1 December 2024
• end by 31 March 2026

Projects must always start on the first of the month and this must be stated within your application. Your project start date will be reflected in your grant offer letter if you are successful.

You must only include eligible project costs in your application.

Under current restrictions, this competition will not fund any procurement, commercial, business development or supply chain activity with any Russian or Belarusian entity as lead, partner or subcontractor. This includes any goods or services originating from a Russian or Belarusian source.

The aim of this competition is to develop a product or process that enables data from micro, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and large organisations to be shared in a trust less environment. The product or process must enable the development of new Artificial Intelligence solutions for the benefit of supply chain efficiency and firm level productivity. The output of these projects must be in the form of a demonstrator.

Your project must:

• consider a clear monetisation strategy to incentivise data sharing from both SMEs and large organisations
• demonstrate benefits to supply chain efficiency from the development and deployment of artificial intelligence solutions
• consider how the core principles of responsible and trustworthy AI will be implemented in your product or process
• demonstrate your product or process in a relevant or operational environment, achieving a minimum technology readiness level of 6

You must also demonstrate benefits for at least two of the three key sectors areas:

• transport, logistics, warehousing
• agriculture, food processing
• construction

Portfolio approach

We want to fund a variety of projects across markets, technological maturities and research categories. We call this a portfolio approach.

Your project can focus on one or more of the following:

• federated database systems
• data access layers
• novel privacy enhancing technologies and differential privacy systems
• multimodal AI
• data interoperability

Pre-recorded briefing event

Key dates

• 24 June 2024: Competition opens
• July: Q&A webinar (date TBC)
• 21 August 2024 11:00am: Competition closes
• 27 September 2024: Applicants notified

Check out the ‘Good Application Guide’ for extra support in preparing your application.

If you need more information about how to apply or you want to submit your application in Welsh, email support@iuk.ukri.org or call 0300 321 4357.

Our phone lines are open from 9am to 12pm and 2pm to 5pm UK time, Monday to Friday (excluding bank holidays).