Preface of the 1st Italian Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Applications for Business and Industries

The 1st Italian Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Applications for Business and Industries (AIABI) is co-located and held within the 20th International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA 2021) and organized by Social Thingum, an Italian notable AI scale-up company and private research and technology-transfer center, located in Milan, Lombardy. The workshop is also sponsored by Assintel, the National Association of ICT Companies of Confcommercio, as well as by InnovUp, the Italian Innovation & Startup Ecosystem. This edition is held online due to the COVID-19 pandemics and the program of the meeting is available on the official workshop website. The workshop is focused on the current technological scenario of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for business in heterogenous fields and industries. Among the editions of the AIxIA annual International Conferences, this is the very first workshop specifically devoted to the many applications and potentialities of AI in business contexts and domains. Therefore, it represented a major official opportunity for organizations, academics, researchers and specifically firms, decision-makers and practitioners, in the Italian and international AI landscape, to share and analyze heterogenous research works and business case studies dealing with AI in business fields. Indeed, the main idea behind this workshop is creating a fruitful occasion for both the academic and the industrial world to share knowledge and experience related to how AI is actually and currently affecting business cases and companies. According to its mission, this workshop is aimed at providing participants with a broad set of insights on the several potential synergies of AI and business.