Denmark’s ATP is taking a front seat in a national drive to train a fifth of the Nordic country’s population in the use of artificial intelligence (AI), it announced today, with the statutory pensions giant describing building AI skills as a strategic focus.

ATP, the DKK689bn (€92.3bn) mandatory labour-market supplementary pension scheme, said it has become a founding partner of the AI Competence Pact – a public-private partnership (PPP) involving companies, public authorities, educational institutions and organisations.

The PPP says on its website its goal is to “raise the digital skills of one million Danes in all parts of the labour market and the education system, by initiating large-scale collaborative projects across companies and organisations and by supporting the projects that the partners themselves launch”.

Anne Kristine Axelsson, ATP group director in charge of pension and labour market operations, said: “In all our customer service and case processing, AI already plays a significant role in enabling us to work efficiently and create good citizen and customer experiences.”

“But it doesn’t happen by itself, so it’s important that we’re ambitious and constantly develop the business and our employees’ competencies within the use of artificial intelligence,” she said, adding that this was why ATP also thought the AI skills pact was an important initiative.

Asked what ATP’s role would be in the PPP, a spokesman for the pension fund told IPE that as a founding partner, ATP would be part of various working groups that would come up with concrete recommendations on how AI should be used in the right way, where there would be good opportunities for knowledge sharing.

By joining the AI Competence Pact, ATP said it was also committing to continuously upgrading its employees in the use of the technology.

“The effort will include both general understanding of technology and more specialist knowledge in data ethics, automation and the use of generative AI,” the pension fund said.

Axelsson said: “The aim is to ensure that ATP doesn’t just keep up with developments, but helps shape them.”

“It is about both exploiting the potential of technology and managing its risks with care and responsibility,” she said.

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Rachel is IPE's Nordic correspondent. She has long been a freelance writer, and over the years, has written for The Telegraph, The Independent, The Observer, AMWatch and elsewhere. In 2001, Rachel's personal finance book Kickstart Your Money was published by John Wiley & Sons.View full Profile

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