Willemijn Aerdts

Europe has no shortage of digital strategies, regulatory frameworks, or political ambition. The harder question is how quickly those ambitions are translating into real adoption, diffusion, and scale—fast enough to sustain competitiveness in a world accelerating toward frontier AI, advanced compute, cloud infrastructure, and data driven growth.

As global powers move decisively to industrialize AI and embed it across their economies, Europe faces a pivotal moment: the question is which levers will accelerate the conversion of governance leadership and policy coherence into technology uptake that drives productivity, resilience, and growth—and how to reduce friction from deployment gaps, market fragmentation, and slow diffusion so Europe can scale delivery.

Progress against the priorities set out in the Draghi Report — and the evidence measuring real world adoption of critical technologies across Europe — are at the centre of the agenda, alongside an evaluation of the effectiveness of policies designed to accelerate scale.

• Where does Europe need to accelerate tech uptake and diffusion in pursuit of the Draghi roadmap?
• What does tech adoption evidence reveal about the most urgent gaps to fix?

Executive Summary

This session brought together senior figures from the European Commission, national government, defence industry and global technology to confront the specific mechanisms behind Europe's AI scaling problem. The central diagnosis was unambiguous: Europe is not losing because it lacks researchers, ideas or ambition, but because fragmented capital markets, slow procurement cycles, regulatory sequencing that precedes rather than follows adoption, and inconsistent public-sector leadership combine to prevent promising innovations from reaching scale. Henna Virkkunen outlined the Commission's forthcoming tech sovereignty package, distinguishing genuine strategic independence from protectionism and identifying AI, quantum, chips and cybersecurity as priority sectors for European capacity-building. Lisa Monaco's Microsoft AI diffusion data reinforced the message that adoption is the decisive variable, and that the countries leading globally (UAE, Singapore, South Korea) are achieving results through public-sector adoption, investment in skills and local language model development rather than frontier research. Micael Johansson offered the defence industry's perspective: AI is being embedded in systems at pace, but the acquisition model must shift from periodic procurement to continuous capability development in genuine partnership with military end users, and the AI Act's burden on industrial applications must be revisited. The session closed on the question of trust, where panellists converged on the view that trust is inseparable from resilience.

Livestream Link:  https://youtube.com/live/zKJDFe24cac?feature=share

Children today navigate a digital world rich with opportunity but also exposure to grooming, harmful content, and manipulative design. Europe is already responding: the DSA's guidelines on protecting minors are setting new expectations for platforms, and the Commission's Special Panel on child safety online is actively shaping the next wave of policy. Momentum is real — and it is accelerating. Alongside this, the private sector is moving. Platforms and technology companies are developing smarter age assurance tools, refining content moderation at scale, and rethinking how privacy and safety are built into their products. The challenge now is making sure these efforts are coordinated, ambitious, and focused on what actually works for children.

• What is the current EU legislative landscape delivering in practice and what gaps remain?
• How are platforms and technology companies innovating on child safety right now, from age assurance to algorithmic accountability?
• As AI systems increasingly shape how children learn, communicate, and access information online, how can we ensure these technologies respect children’s rights — including privacy, healthy development, and freedom of expression?
• Where are the most promising opportunities for public-private collaboration to turn policy commitments into meaningful change for children and families?

Executive Summary

The panel moved quickly from principles to specific failures and specific remedies. Noeline Blackwell provided the sharpest challenge: the same conversation about age verification had taken place at GLOBSEC a year earlier with essentially the same participants, and in the interim, children had continued to be harmed at scale. She argued that platforms could build age-aware systems if they chose to. They have the resources and the technical capacity, and the failure to do so reflects inadequate regulatory pressure rather than genuine impossibility. David Wheeldon acknowledged that more could be done on age inference across different age groups and was candid that a clear policy mandate from governments would give companies the signal to invest in that capability, confirming Blackwell's implicit point. Commissioner McGrath outlined the Commission's trajectory: a forthcoming Digital Fairness Act, the ongoing expert panel on child safety, an age verification app now being implemented in a number of member states, and DSA enforcement actions underway. He was firm that switching off platforms is not a viable option, but that the status quo is also inadequate, and indicated that a Commission initiative on child safety online is likely following the July expert panel report. Willemijn Aerdts noted that political momentum across Europe is accelerating, with 14 countries now engaged on the issue, and emphasised the need to protect children's privacy while doing so — rejecting approaches that require children to produce identity documents to access digital services.

Livestream Link:  https://youtube.com/live/73C4OW-DGe4?feature=share