Zoetermeers Dagblad | Province of South Holland wins prize for brilliant AI failure

The province of South Holland has won the Brilliant AI Failure 2024 Award. The prize was awarded at the NL AI Congress in Amersfoort by the Institute for Brilliant Failures. It is committed to facilitating and making learning experiences accessible.

South Holland won with the ‘predictive road maintenance’ algorithm. Together with the start-up Geronimo, we experimented with artificial intelligence (AI). The Province was curious whether they could predict road maintenance this way.

“The technical collaboration with Geronimo went great, but we discovered that our data quality is not yet in order,” says Maurice Weijermans of the Province of South Holland. “And that the dataset we wanted to use was too small in number of years. We learned a lot from this.”

Deputy Frederik Zevenbergen: “It’s wonderful that we won this prize. If you want to innovate and pioneer, you should not be afraid of failure. Because you can’t avoid that. A Brilliant Failure is a source of new knowledge and innovation. It encourages open and transparent conversations within government.”