TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) presided over the second Best AI Awards ceremony Saturday, presenting eight gold medals to teams from industry and academia in a bid to accelerate artificial intelligence adoption, per CNA.
Kung said Taiwan holds key advantages in AI hardware, including semiconductors and servers, but emphasized that the next phase of development will focus on practical applications across industries. He said broader implementation would allow domestic sectors to more fully benefit from AI technologies.
The ceremony was held at Nangang Exhibition Center Hall 2. This year’s competition drew 1,487 teams from 36 countries, nearly doubling international participation compared with the inaugural event.
Gold medal winners included teams from Delta Electronics, Kneron, BioPro Scientific, Alpenglow Tek, National Cheng Kung University, and National Formosa University, as well as teams from Thailand and Poland.
Kung said that under the Cabinet’s 10 new AI infrastructure initiatives, the MOEA will take primary responsibility for implementing AI applications. He noted that more than 50 pilot sites with AI automation capabilities have been established, covering 23 key industries, and that over 1,000 mentors have been deployed across northern, central, southern, and eastern Taiwan, per CNA.
He added that an industry competitiveness advisory team is currently assisting more than 2,600 companies in adopting AI.
The ministry’s Department of Industrial Technology said the competition responded to rapid developments in agentic AI and edge AI, helping guide industries to adopt emerging technologies. It said AI is evolving from a passive response tool into a smart partner capable of autonomous judgment and task execution.
Officials said entries spanned sectors including healthcare, information and communications technology, manufacturing, and education, leveraging Taiwan’s strengths in integrated circuit design. More than 430 projects focused on lightweight AI applications, enabling real-time operation on end-user devices such as sensors and factory machinery.
