SEISMEC: Piloting the shift to human-centric industry

The SEISMEC project is a major multi-partner initiative funded by the European Union to pioneer human-centric innovation across industry. The aim is to place people — their creativity, safety, autonomy, and dignity — at the heart of industrial transformation and technological change.

SEISMEC works through 17 pilot actions spanning 14 industrial ecosystems in multiple European countries. These pilots cover a broad range of sectors, including platform work, manufacturing, construction, mobility, agri-food, and more.

At the core of SEISMEC is the belief that digital and industrial technologies must not only drive productivity, but also foster inclusive, ethical, sustainable and high-quality jobs. The project emphasises collaboration with end users and workers in design, development and adoption of new tools, ensuring technology serves people, not the other way round.

Why the Project is important

• In many industrial transformations, technological change has focused on automation and efficiency — sometimes at the expense of job satisfaction, worker autonomy, equality and safety. SEISMEC reverses that trend: it aims to ensure technological progress aligns with social and ethical values.
• By embedding co-design, transparency, fairness, inclusion and worker voice, the project addresses systemic risks such as bias in AI, unequal access to opportunities, deskilling, and exclusion.
• The project also develops practical tools and guidelines (including self-assessments, frameworks, auditing protocols, and inclusive design practices) to help organisations assess and improve how worker-friendly and ethically robust their technology deployment is.
• Findings and best practices from the pilots will inform wider industrial strategies and policies, helping European industry adopt innovation in a way that supports people as well as competitiveness.

CESI’s role and contribution

As a dedicated partner in SEISMEC, the European Confederation of Independent Trade Unions (CESI) brings the voice of workers to the centre of the process. CESI’s role includes:

• Advocating for co-creation: ensuring that workers’ perspectives, concerns, needs and expectations are actively collected, considered, and embedded from early in technology design and planning stages.
• Supporting the development of ethical, transparent, trust-worthy ICT and AI tools: emphasising the need for fairness, auditability, worker control and clarity about how decisions are made.
• Promoting inclusive and just transformation: highlighting re-skilling and up-skilling needs, as well as social security and worker protections where job changes are inevitable.
• Raising awareness of equality issues, including gender bias and access barriers, and ensuring “equality-by-design” approaches are part of all pilot activities.
• Contributing to policy-oriented recommendations and dissemination of project insights to wider audiences of workers, employers, social partners and policy-makers.

Expected impact and outcomes

Through SEISMEC, CESI seeks to help shape workplaces that are:

• More empowering, with greater worker agency, voice and participation in decision-making.
• Ethically sound, with transparent, fair systems and corrective mechanisms for bias or misuse.
• Inclusive and equitable, addressing barriers based on gender, skill, background or other factors.
• Sustainable, in the sense of worker well-being, job satisfaction, safety, continuous learning and adaptability.
• Competitive, by combining human creativity, skill development and innovation with responsible digital tools.

Timeline & funding

• SEISMEC began in January 2024 and runs over roughly four years.
• It is funded under the Horizon Europe programme and encompasses a broad consortium of academic, industrial, technology, and civil society partners.
• The total budget supports research, pilot deployment, tool development, evaluation, dissemination and policy advice.

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