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
