Responsible and Sustainable AI, Tech and Digitalization

From experimentation to application: building tech that works responsibly and sustainably, at scale

For the past five years, the Prototype Fund Switzerland has supported early-stage projects exploring how technology can serve the public good.

The idea was simple: if we fund open, data-driven, and human-centered approaches early enough, we can prove that technology is not just part of the problem, but rather, part of the solution.

And it worked.

Across four programme cycles, our past projects demonstrated that alternative ways of designing and building technology are possible. Whether in civic tech, sustainability, education and data infrastructure, they can be more transparent, more inclusive, and more aligned with the actual needs of society.

Today, however, that context has changed.

A different technological reality

What began 5-10 years ago as an exploration of emerging technologies now exists in a fundamentally different world.

Technology is no longer just experimental.
It is – and continues to be – embedded in nearly every aspect of society.

Open source and data are no longer just a frontier. They are the foundation – and one that continues to be renewed. And a new layer has rapidly risen from that foundation: artificial intelligence and its data-based nature.

AI is now being deployed across industries and public institutions. Governments are beginning to define frameworks for its use, such as Switzerland signing the Council of Europe Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence in March 2025.

At the same time, technological transformation continues steadily and cumulatively, much like the internet has done since becoming a global commercial network nearly 40 years ago.

This is not a momentary disruption followed by stability & status quo, but a continuous evolution.

The question is no longer whether technology will shape society – it already does.

And over the past two decades, notably since the advent of social media and platform-based tech, this evolution has been marked by invasive choices signaling a clear lack of concern for the common good.

And so, the question becomes: how do we design, regulate, and implement tech so that it can live up to its potential for collective benefit?

From “tech for good” to responsibility at scale

This shift has major consequences for how we think about innovation.

Proving that “tech for good” is possible has been limited to niche contexts, that is, smaller-scale experimentation. We ourselves are an example, as are the Mozilla Foundation Incubator or the Hardware Prototype Fund. 

In today’s context, this is no longer enough.

Because the digital technologies and systems shaping our societies are no longer niche. They operate at scale.

This means that responsibility and sustainability cannot remain simply afterthoughts. Instead, they need to become core design principles: embedded from the start, and capable of scaling with the technologies themselves.

This is where the role of the Prototype Fund Switzerland is rising to meet the moment: from funding isolated experiments, to enabling learnings on how to build responsible and sustainable technology by default.

There is a definitive lack of spaces where responsible and sustainable technology are built, tested, and iterated in practice – especially with the goal of learning how we can scale the responsibility and sustainability of AI, data and technology.

This is the gap we strive to address.

Prototyping responsibility in practice

The Prototype Fund Switzerland creates a structured environment for experimentation that is:

• practice-driven
• interdisciplinary
• human-centered
• open to iteration and learning

We support teams in developing functional prototypes that do more than demonstrate technical feasibility.

They explore questions such as:

• What does responsible AI look like in a concrete use case?
• How can sustainability be integrated into system design, rather than merely tacked on at the end?
• What governance mechanisms are needed for real-world deployment?

Each project becomes a testing ground: not only for clear solutions, but also for the methodologies,  hypotheses and necessary failures which generate them.

And just as importantly, these learnings are documented and shared.

Because the goal is not only to build individual projects. We aim to contribute to a bigger, broader understanding of how responsible and sustainable technology can become tangible, actionable, and genuinely beneficial.

Responsibility, sustainability, and their tensions

One of the key insights from recent years is that responsibility and sustainability are not abstract ideals. They are practical challenges.

Take digital sustainability:

Digital technologies have the potential to improve efficiency, enable circular systems, and reduce emissions. At the same time, they are themselves resource intensive.

• ICT already accounts for a significant and growing share of global emissions
• Data centers consume vast amounts of energy and water
• Efficiency gains often lead to increased consumption (rebound effects)

This means that technological progress alone does not automatically lead to better outcomes.

It depends on how technologies are designed, used, and embedded in broader systems.

Similar tensions exist in AI:

• between innovation and accountability
• between scalability and control
• between performance and environmental cost

These tensions cannot be resolved in theory alone.

They need to be worked through in practice.

From principles to implementation

This is why the focus of our current funding round is:

Responsible and Sustainable AI, Tech and Digitalization

Rather than treating these as abstract principles, we are interested in how they are implemented:

• in concrete use cases
• in real-world environments
• under real constraints

We are looking for projects that:

• reduce resource use or emissions
• strengthen accountability and transparency
• contribute to resilient and trustworthy digital systems

But more importantly, we are looking for projects that help answer a broader question:

How do we build technology that remains responsible and sustainable – notably as it scales?

What we fund, and why it matters

The Prototype Fund Switzerland supports interdisciplinary teams to develop their ideas into working prototypes.

This includes:

• funding
• coaching and mentoring
• access to a strong ecosystem across tech, policy, and society

But the real value lies in something else:

A space to test, fail, learn, and iterate before systems are deployed at scale.

Because once technologies are embedded in infrastructures, markets, and institutions, changing them becomes exponentially harder.

Early-stage experimentation is not a luxury.
It is a necessity.

An invitation

We do not claim to have the answers.

What we offer is a structured way to explore them, together with people who are willing to engage with complexity, uncertainty, and real-world constraints.

If you are working on an idea that:

• combines technology with societal impact
• engages with responsibility and sustainability
• and aims to create solutions that work beyond the prototype

we invite you to apply.

The future of technology will not be defined by whether it works.It will be defined by how it works: for society, for the environment, and at scale.