On June 11, 2025, the Innovation Lab Day for the European AI-on-Demand platform took place at the University of Paris. Our colleague Jakob Mertes, Machine Learning Engineer at the Artificial Intelligence Center Hamburg (ARIC), participated in the workshop and took the opportunity to learn more about the AI-on-Demand platform. It was launched by the EU project AI4Europe to bundle a wide range of AI tools, datasets, and resources and make them easily accessible. The main goal of the AI-on-Demand platform is to support the development and testing of AI models in the European Union. The services and functions offered by AI-on-Demand are aimed particularly at small and medium-sized enterprises and public administration – all target groups of the EDIH Hamburg.
During the one-day workshop, the participants mainly worked with the AI-Builder, a sub-area of AI-on-Demand, and tested various topic blocks.
In the first module, participants tested the creation of a RAG application with just a few clicks in the Design Studio. The Design Studio is an environment within the AI Builder that allows elements such as language models, databases, and chat interfaces to be linked without programming code. Although some difficulties remain, according to our colleague, this task was completed successfully, and the finished RAG application could be deployed and tested directly from the Design Studio.
Other test areas included working with MemoryGraphs and creating an MCP server. These applications, too, were quickly created, deployed, and ready for testing with some time to explore the elements and their connections in the Design Studio.
“Experience has shown that such fast and efficient no-code solutions have primarily come from large US providers such as Azure or AWS. It is therefore a positive development for Europe to put itself in a good position with the AI-on-demand platform in order not to lose touch with the AI sector,” says our AI expert Jakob Mertes.
Although there is still significant room for improvement and some bugs that need to be fixed in order to become truly competitive with the commercial providers from the USA, this step is already being planned with the EU follow-up project (DeployAI). Even if the AI-on-demand platform is not yet fully stable and mature, with this development the remaining steps towards Europe-wide scaling seem foreseeable and well prepared.
If you would like to learn more about the AI-on-demand platform or would like to test the platform, please contact Jakob Mertes, Machine Learning Engineer at ARIC e.V. Hamburg: mertes@aric-hamburg.de
Image source: The organizers
