The Greater Risk

Ensuring Europe doesn’t miss out on AI’s opportunities

This week I’m in Europe engaging in conversations about how AI can drive economic growth and the steps Europe can take to seize its potential.

My trip is coming at an important moment when we are seeing remarkable advances in AI tools, reasoning, multi-modal awareness, and in AI’s ability to manage increasingly complex tasks. AI is not just a scientific breakthrough—it’s a breakthrough in how we make breakthroughs. 

While adoption and deployment always take time, the direction of travel is clear—and in many ways, Europe is in an excellent position. It has a well-educated workforce and a single market, which could help new innovation scale and benefit everyone rapidly.

However, as the science progresses, much of the public discussion has been about risks, ranging from AI safety to concerns about discrimination and misuse to impacts on labor markets. 

It’s important to address these issues—but we should also recognize that innovation in the long term typically leads to more, not less, safety. And I fear what isn’t being talked about is the greater risk: The risk of missing out on the next technological revolution.

It was only a couple weeks ago Mario Draghi delivered his long-anticipated report on the future of European competitiveness to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

The former Italian Prime Minister and European Central Bank chief raised concerns that Europe’s productivity crisis is harming living standards, growth, exports, and investment. 

“Europe largely missed out on the digital revolution led by the internet and the productivity gains it brought,” he wrote. But his larger concern was that Europe might now be missing out on the new wave of emerging technologies driving future growth, with “regulatory asymmetries” hobbling its most productive companies and start-ups.

The data supports his analysis. 

A recent European Investment Bank survey found that over 60% of large companies and small and medium-sized enterprises identified regulation as key obstacles to European investment.

That finding shouldn’t come as a surprise when we consider just how many well-intentioned, yet too-often conflicting, untested, and inconsistently implemented rules have been adopted recently.

For our part, we support the AI Act, but it adds to more than 100 regulations adopted over the last five years targeting the digital economy. 

With AI promising to power competitiveness and bring economic, social, and sustainability benefits on a scale we’ve not seen before, a targeted approach to regulation is needed—one that focuses not on starting from scratch, but on filling specific gaps in existing laws to give companies of all sizes the legal certainty they need to invest in new products and services.

What Europe stands to gain

If we do this right, AI can power a new era of European competitiveness, bringing economic, social, and sustainability benefits on a scale we’ve not seen before. 

What's at stake here is Europe's global competitiveness in every sector, not just its competitiveness in tech. Take for example, CMA-CGM, which is partnering with Google to use advanced geospatial information and AI tools to adjust shipping routes based on real-time data, reducing delays and fuel consumption. Or Carrefour Belgium, which is using AI to improve stock availability, reduce food waste, and introduce new digital services to keep up with online customer demand. 

Absent the right regulatory and enabling environment to spur the adoption of AI solutions at scale, Europe’s automotive, banking, consumer products, pharma sectors, and more will lose out in global competition with overseas competitors who are eagerly adopting them. That's why so many European CEOs have been calling for more restrained regulation of this general-purpose technology. 

A new report by Implement Consulting Group, commissioned by Google, estimates that generative AI could add €1.2-1.4 trillion to the EU's GDP or 8% in ten years.

But regulation is only one piece of the puzzle. Boosting competitiveness and enabling breakthroughs will also require governments and companies to invest in three areas: R&D, infrastructure, and people. 

R&D: The US spends almost twice as much as the EU on AI research and development. But the EU also lags behind the rate of R&D investment of Israel, South Korea, Japan, the UK, and China.

To catch up, R&D needs to become a shared priority for governments, working with the private sector and making funding more accessible. With the right incentives in place, Europe can foster AI innovation and improve its chances of launching more home-grown tech unicorns.

Infrastructure: AI breakthroughs are only possible with the right high-performance computing technologies, data centers, and renewable energy opportunities to support them—but the EU currently lags behind on AI infrastructure. 

To enable AI innovation at scale, we will need to allocate more funding to building infrastructure at scale, and incentivizing and enabling the private sector to do the same.

People: It’s tempting to look just at hard inputs—chips and data and electricity. But the biggest AI breakthroughs often come from new scientific approaches and bringing together computer scientists at the cutting edge.  

Whether we’re facilitating the transfer of technology and technologists from Europe’s leading universities or equipping workers with the skills needed to thrive in an AI-augmented future, we need to invest in people. 

Our new report indicates that 61% of jobs will be transformed by generative AI, with 7% requiring significant reskilling. 

Public-private partnerships are vital for supporting this transition. 

On this front, I’m pleased to report that work is well underway. Over the last decade, Google has worked with governments to help over 13 million Europeans learn digital skills to build their business or career, while our €25M AI Opportunity Fund works with civil society to train the most vulnerable people in Europe.

Looking ahead, we should keep the momentum going and keep collaborating to create more opportunities for upskilling and retraining. 

Let’s get to work

In the last year and half, AI has lived up to its potential to help with some of our greatest social challenges: Predicting the shapes of nearly all known proteins, providing early warnings in advance of floods, and accelerating work on neglected diseases.

Europe can and should benefit from this technology, and with the risk of missing this opportunity is too great to ignore, what we do next matters. 

We look forward to continuing to partner with governments, industry, and civil society to help them seize the AI opportunity ahead.