Vestager touts AI-powered vision for Europe’s tech future

Industrial data is key to Europe’s ‘second chance’ at becoming a world leader in tech, the Danish politician said.

Europe may never produce a rival to Facebook, but it still has a chance of outpacing rivals in Silicon Valley or Shenzhen thanks to a coming wave of artificial intelligence powered by industrial data, according to the bloc’s digital czar Margrethe Vestager.

The vision for Europe’s “second chance” on tech relies on leveraging vast troves of data produced by industrial giants like Volkswagen, Engie or Nokia — and making better use of it than competitors in the United States or China.

“One of the reasons why we don’t have a Facebook and we don’t have a Tencent is that we never gave European businesses a full single market where they could scale up,” Vestager told reporters ahead of the publication of the European Commission’s white paper on artificial intelligence and a new data strategy on February 19.

“Now when we have a second go, the least we can do is to make sure that you have a real single market,” she added.

As POLITICO first reported on January 29, the EU’s executive arm wants to create a single market for data. The strategy relies on the notion of “data spaces” — or infrastructure for large pools of data that can be shared between sectors and companies, and improves access to European cloud providers.

To develop its vision of industrial data pools, the Commission is eyeing an investment of up to €6 billion that would be raised together with member countries and industry, according to a recent draft of the data strategy, obtained by POLITICO.

“If this is to be successful then we should not put our business-to-business AI in the same position as our business-to-consumer technology, having no single market,” Vestager said.

Europe wants to become the go-to place for high-quality data for artificial intelligence.

The need for a data strategy comes from the fact that “we are what we eat” when it comes to the data that feeds artificial intelligence, Vestager said. “If you eat crappy stuff, you’re not likely to be a fit-for-purpose algorithm,” she said.

Ensuring that the data feeding artificial intelligence applications is up to par and shared freely will allow Europe to develop the kind of technology that will help it take on America and China.

But the package that will be unveiled on Wednesday will only be part of a larger puzzle in Europe’s quest to create prosperity through digitalization, Vestager said.

The Danish politician, who also has oversight of the bloc’s competition enforcement, emphasized that innovation must not come at the expense of European values and must benefit its citizens and democracies.

Calls for European “technological sovereignty” have raised alarm bells among industrial players and free-trading countries, which fear that political control over competition decisions would lead to picking winners and protectionism.

But Vestager said the Commission’s strategy was not about closing out rivals.

“It has been very important for us to make sure that this is about us and not about other people — that being sovereign means that you can do stuff. That you can actually do your research, you can develop things, you can make it, you can deploy it,” she said.

In order to succeed, however, Europe would have to change its image from that of a “regulatory superpower” — adept at writing rules for technologies created by other countries — to that of an innovation powerhouse.

“We have this sort of self-assessment that we are a regulatory superpower,” she added. “You can regulate things that you know about, [but it’s] very difficult to regulate things that you do not know about. And if you want to have a say in things that we consider risky — well then you should be able also to do it yourself.”

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