Big Data, Intelligenza Artificiale e Valutazione: cosa accade in Italia

In this article, we will address an aspect many have considered "exotic" in the evolving evaluation landscape. We are referring to the diverse world of Big Data (BD) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which arguably repre-sent one of the significant innovations in the field of evaluation and will likely continue to grow and evolve in the decades to come. We will discuss three specific aspects: 1) the opportunities and main uses that BD and AI offer to evaluation; 2) the challenges and risks that evaluation research and practice are facing concerning the 'new' availabil-ity of data and analysis methods not classically referable to the world of evaluators; 3) The state of diffusion in Italy of BD and AI in evaluation research and practice.