The EU should focus less on winning the race to build artificial intelligence and more on how to deploy it to turn around the bloc’s sluggish productivity, the European Commission’s chief AI adviser told commissioners.
The technology is Europe’s best chance to accelerate growth in a range of sectors — including health, agriculture, transport, defense and manufacturing — Jim Hagemann Snabe, the EU’s new special envoy for industrial AI, told the bloc’s 27 commissioners at a Sept. 4 seminar, according to two Commission officials. They were granted anonymity to discuss the private briefing.
The EU is trying to capture the economic gains of rapidly advancing AI even as it grapples with the technology’s risks to jobs, security and society. Europe’s leaders should not worry too much about leading the development of frontier AI models, but should “be the ones who draw the greatest value from it” while managing its dangers, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in her State of the Union speech last week.
The Commission brought Snabe in as special envoy in July to advise von der Leyen and Executive Vice President Henna Virkkunen on industrial AI and shape the EU executive’s strategy on the technology. His mandate spans the infrastructure and technologies needed to deploy AI — from data centers, computing capacity and chips to models and applications across industry.
A week before Snabe addressed the commissioners, a Commission AI expert delivered a separate seminar for the commissioners’ heads of cabinet. The Commission declined to name the expert as they are employed in a technical, not political capacity.
The message at both gatherings was to shift the debate from whether Europe can build the world’s leading AI models to how it can use the tech to drive its economy.
The seminars offered an early look at how that work is shaping the Commission’s approach.
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