It is not a simple commercial agreement or a declaration of intent on digitalisation. The agreement signed yesterday between Fincantieri, Poste Italiane and Tim is a truly strategic system operation which marks the birth of the first entirely Italian artificial intelligence supply chain applied to industry. A choice of technological sovereignty coordinated by the three large national players which aims to secure an important slice of Made in Italy, locking down a workload that today is worth as much as 70 billion euros and guaranteeing the country's economic visibility that extends until 2036. The declared objective is to protect the industrial culture of Made in Italy by bringing it to shelter within a sovereign digital ecosystem, impenetrable and entirely governed by algorithms born and managed in our country.
At the center of this profound operational revolution is "Fincantieri Ontology", the guideline of the 2026-2030 industrial plan renamed "F4" (Fast Forward Further Future). In fact, a highly sophisticated software infrastructure, designed to codify the immense wealth of technical knowledge of the shipbuilding industry. The knowledge of the complex construction processes is transformed into a real digital conceptual map. The subsequent field inference phase, i.e. the concrete application of predictive and decision-making models trained by artificial intelligence (AI), will be performed in a hybrid technological environment, divided between local servers on construction sites and a protected national cloud thanks also to the Italian Post Office's hardware and software infrastructures and TIM's connectivity.
The strategy navigates two parallel directions destined to merge into a single digital continuum. On the one hand, there is the "Navis Sapiens" project, focused on the advanced digital management of the ship world, on the other, the "Ontology" ecosystem operates, entirely oriented towards predictive design and construction within factories. Thanks to the computing power shared by the three partners, engineers will develop 4D workflows. This means that robotic welding and heavy handling systems, together with teams of workers, will receive data packages optimized daily by the algorithm, reducing downtime and overcoming traditional construction constraints in a sector historically considered to have low digital penetration.
The redesigned supply chain activates direct purchases on Italian territory for 55 billion euros, involving a branched network of approximately 7,000 small and medium-sized businesses. The ambition of Europe's second largest manufacturing industry is also to trigger an epochal transition: the evolution of manpower into "workforce". It's not about replacing workers with robots, but about enhancing their capabilities in the field. The historical skills of naval craftsmen (blue collar) will be integrated with those of the new digital collars. Together with Poste and Tim, a safe place was founded, significantly renamed a "tabernacle of knowledge", where the so-called tacit knowledge can be protected and exploited, i.e. that set of stratified technical culture, handed down orally and preserved in the experience of individual workers, which has always constituted the true competitive advantage of Made in Italy in the world.
Pierroberto Folgiero, CEO of Fincantieri, explains that «data and artificial intelligence are the engine of our 2026-2030 industrial plan. With the launch of this strategic partnership we are not only digitizing an industrial process but we are writing and protecting the ontology of our technical culture. Together with Poste Italiane and Tim we are building a protected and sovereign environment to lead the Physical AI revolution."
We, remarks Matteo Del Fante, CEO of Poste Italiane, «are doing our best, supporting Folgiero's vision. Its production system must adapt to the efficiency tools that technology and AI allow today. Giving him a hand means carrying out an important pilot project on a leading company that activates an immense supply chain of SMEs, concretely demonstrating that innovation can be done and thus giving an optimistic and constructive signal to the entire Italian production system."
«We are launching ourselves into the future – adds Pietro Labriola, CEO of Tim – we absolutely cannot afford to wait. With AI and through the profound redigitalization of our industrial processes, leveraging ontology, we project ourselves into the future. We have no other viable paths or alternatives, either we do it now with conviction or we remain dangerously tied to the past."
