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Simone Vannuccini holds the position of Chaire de Professeur Junior (Junior Professor Chair) in Economics of Artificial Intelligence and Innovation at GREDEG (Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS, France).
There, with his team he conducts research and teaching on the topic of Economics and Strategy of AI and technological change more generally. Prof Vannuccini has been holding teaching and research positions at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) of the University of Sussex, Imperial College London, and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany). His research focuses on technology evolution, the economics of AI, industrial dynamics, science, technology and industrial policy, and the economics of digitalisation.

His presentation "Forum Numerica - Robots and Innovation – Innovation in Robots?"

This presentation combines two recent studies: the first analyses the impact of robot adoption on firms’ product innovation, to test whether robots in their current form are really an ‘enabling technology’; the second takes a look at how recent advances in AI vision-language-action models are transforming the landscape of robot technology and the companies producing them. The rationale of combining the two studies is to show how technology and economic dynamics co-evolve and cross-shape each other.

There, together with his team (called chAIre), he leads research and teaching on the topic of AI Economics, which includes the organisation of VOILA! seminars. His current work explores how the AI industry is developing: who and how innovates, whether we are heading towards an increasingly concentrated and integrated AI market, and what are the implications of this for policy, in particular (European) industrial policy and competition policy. At the same time, Simone is very interested in the nature of technology; hence, some of his projects investigate the relationship between technical features and firm strategy. He studies that in the context of robotics, remote sensing, and most recently in the convergences of large language models and robots as a case of 'embodied AI'.

The motivation behind launching VOILA! was to create a platform where the most up-to-date research on AI can meet a critical view of the technology that downplays the hype and favours inclusivity and access. Together with Lucile Sassatelli, Ekaterina Prytkova, and the EFELIA and Chair teams, we thought that an initiative such as VOILA! would represent the best type of scientific dialogue: one that leaves no one behind!

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