Fondazione Agire at AI Salon Lugano: focus on Apertus and SMEs

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Fondazione Agire, together with Acer and Linkfloyd, supported the fourth edition of AI Salon Lugano, held on April 22, 2026 at Acer’s European headquarters in Bioggio and dedicated to Apertus, the first open-source LLM developed in Switzerland.

The event opened with the roundtable “Apertus: updates and institutional perspectives,” which featured Stefano Colombo, President of Fondazione Agire. In his speech, he emphasized how, through numerous meetings with local companies via Fondazione Agire’s Digital Coach service, a concrete interest in AI is emerging, along with the need to support SMEs, which often start from a not yet fully structured digital foundation.

In its role as the innovation agency for the Canton of Ticino, Fondazione Agire works daily to support businesses—especially SMEs—guiding them through transformation processes and facilitating access to skills, tools, and opportunities. In this context, the work carried out together with the Canton to promote and stimulate interest around Apertus also fits in.

Andrea Barni, Deputy Director and Head of the SME sector, provided an operational perspective by illustrating how to adopt Apertus within a company, addressing practical aspects such as costs, access methods, advantages, and potential obstacles. In particular, Apertus is suitable for applications such as the translation of sensitive documents, assistants based on internal knowledge bases, or contexts where data control and compliance are crucial. The presentation also highlighted how SMEs should adopt a gradual approach, starting with lighter solutions and validating value before scaling.

Ultimately, as emerged during the event, the value of artificial intelligence does not come from adopting the model itself, but from its integration into business processes.

To explore the content presented by Fondazione Agire during the event in more detail, the slides from Andrea Barni’s presentation are available at the following link.

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