European SMEs must address ambitious sustainability goals while facing skills shortages and increasing market volatility. WASABI introduces intelligent digital assistance solutions to help manufacturers strengthen resilience, accelerate decision-making, and support a human-centered transition toward sustainable production.
Driving Sustainability in a Challenging Industrial Landscape
European small and medium-sized manufacturers are under pressure to meet the ambitious climate neutrality targets set by the EU Green Deal. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions by over 55% by 2030 requires rapid transformation, yet SMEs often face structural barriers: limited resources, restricted access to skilled workers, and uncertainty caused by economic and geopolitical crises.
Operating in niche markets or providing specialized components makes them particularly vulnerable to disruptions and cautious about investments with unpredictable outcomes. At the same time, demographic changes and competition from larger employers intensify the struggle to secure qualified talent. These challenges highlight a pressing question: how can SMEs innovate, remain competitive, and embrace sustainability without overextending their capacities?
The ICT sector has long developed tools to assist complex decision-making, but only recently have these solutions become accessible to manufacturing.
Intelligent Digital Assistant: an opportunity for SMEs
The WASABI project brings this opportunity directly to SMEs through intelligent digital assistance and conversational AI. By enabling workers to interact with complex software via natural language,
WASABI lowers skill barriers and helps teams analyze situations, plan interventions, monitor sustainability impacts, and recover faster from crises.
Its Digital Intelligent Assistant (DIA) supports hybrid human-AI collaboration, reinforcing workers’ cognitive capabilities while preserving human autonomy. Moreover, new training services offered through the DIH network provide essential upskilling on AI, digital literacy, and human-AI interaction.
With these tools, SMEs can integrate new workers more quickly, enhance resilience, and approach sustainability as a manageable, data-driven process. WASABI shows that digital assistance can become a standard practice — affordable, trustworthy, and designed for the human-centered factories of the future.