19
May
2026
Watch
Opportunities and challenges presented by a comprehensive artificial intelligence strategy for EU trade (debate)
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, artificial intelligence is an opportunity and this is, of course, also true for the trade sector. The risk, however, is concrete: becoming more and more a digital colony dependent on someone else, on platforms, on clouds, on hardware, on models developed far from Europe. So, building a completely European supply chain, from infrastructure to artificial intelligence, is certainly an exciting goal, a goal that we like to aim for, but, if we are to be realistic, that today seems really difficult to achieve. Being able to make the digital ecosystem as European as possible is a more pragmatic goal and more within our reach, perhaps combining it with concrete support for companies, with serious protection of industrial know-how. It would not be bad either to act on the lever of regulatory simplification, given that today a European SME risks taking more time to understand how to comply with the rules, than to develop innovation. So, I'll give you a challenge: European regulatory sandboxes dedicated to innovative and strategic companies, especially SMEs and start-ups‑up, to test AI solutions quickly and competitively and bring Europe back to the center of technological development, including in AI. Because it's not a lost challenge: I believe that it is still possible for Europe to play a leading role in this global challenge.