Google’s President of Global Affairs, Kent Walker, pressed EU policymakers to accelerate the rollout of artificial intelligence by adopting a smarter regulatory approach, warning that slow uptake could undercut Europe’s economic prospects and its security position as competition from China intensifies. He said the stakes are high for businesses, public services and the overall strategic standing of the continent.
Speaking at the Competitive Europe Summit in Brussels, Walker described AI as what philosophers and economists call an “invention of a method of invention,” and argued the technology will touch almost every corner of modern life while defining which nations lead on the international stage. His remarks framed AI not as a niche tool but as a broad platform that could shift power between states and firms.
Walker acknowledged European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s recent emphasis that getting AI right matters. He moved on to a stark contrast between Chinese progress and European uptake, noting heavy state investment in AI across China that is embedding the technology into many parts of that economy.
“The strategy is paying off,” Walker stated. “The latest estimates suggest up to 83% of Chinese companies are already using generative AI. Meanwhile, the European Commission estimates that European adoption is hovering at around 14%.”
He said that gap is made worse by a crowded regulatory environment that firms operating in the EU find difficult to navigate. Since 2019, more than one hundred new EU rules have targeted the digital economy, creating what Walker described as a climate in which “more than 60% of Europe’s businesses now say regulation is their biggest obstacle to investment in the EU.”
Walker pointed to a Danish government study that estimated the additional annual costs imposed by recent regulatory change on businesses and public administration across Europe at roughly €124 billion. He warned that reforms meant to protect consumers and markets can slow competitiveness if they pile up without coordination. He added that only 11.2% of Mario Draghi’s recommendations on EU competitiveness had been adopted after a year, and cited an International Monetary Fund analysis that pegs fragmentation inside the Single Market at the equivalent of about a 45% tariff on goods and roughly a 110% tariff on services.
In response to that picture, Walker laid out a three-part approach for the EU: create a clear and streamlined policy foundation, build wider adoption through skills and training, and scale up the most promising innovations so they reach businesses and public services across member states.
On the foundational front, he argued the regulatory landscape needs simplification and better alignment so rules protect people without choking off lower-risk, beneficial uses. “Regulating in ways that support AI innovation means focusing on the real-world effects of AI,” he explained, warning against one-size-fits-all measures that treat every application the same.
Walker said regulators should aim to fill targeted legal gaps rather than apply sweeping prohibitions that could block useful tools. He urged oversight that concentrates on outcomes instead of prescriptive technical inputs, putting the point succinctly in another line of guidance: “oversee outputs, not inputs—to manage risks and consequences, not micromanage science.”
That approach, he suggested, should lead to a framework that applies existing laws where appropriate, harmonizes standards with international partners, and lets providers make advanced AI models available to European citizens and companies. The objective should be rules that prevent harm and at the same time leave room for experimentation and investment.
Walker reiterated Google’s long-term presence in Europe as part of his argument for partnership between regulators and industry. He noted the company employs roughly 30,000 people in the region and has invested in substantial infrastructure, including seven data centres and thirteen cloud regions. The European Commission is taking submissions as it shapes its AI strategy, with a 14 October deadline for responses.
The second pillar of Walker’s plan addresses adoption on the ground. He said people and firms must get the skills and tools needed to use AI safely and productively. To illustrate the speed of technical change, he pointed out that Google’s new models are now “300x more efficient than the state-of-the-art from just two years ago.”
He urged public-private initiatives to speed up training efforts. Walker highlighted Google’s decade-long programs that the company says have reached more than 14 million Europeans with digital skills training, and he mentioned its €15 million AI Opportunity Fund aimed at helping vulnerable groups gain basic AI knowledge.
Walker argued that businesses can run pilot projects that test AI in real settings, and that successful pilots should be picked up and expanded by government programs so useful tools reach broader populations, mirroring the ways other large economies scale innovation across sectors.
Trust, he said, is central to wider uptake. Walker described Google’s Sovereign Cloud and related AI offerings as options that let EU customers retain full control over their data under local rules and aligned with European values, delivered through partnerships with firms such as Thales in France and Schwarz Group in Germany.
The third stage is scaling promising breakthroughs beyond familiar consumer apps. He urged policymakers to look past chat-based interfaces, which he described as “just a tiny part of its potential,” and to focus on the scientific and industrial opportunities that AI is enabling. He pointed to Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold, a database that covers almost every protein known to science and is now used by over three million researchers worldwide; Walker noted the tool is helping scientists at the University of Malta explore genetic contributors to osteoporosis. He named GNoME as another example, a project accelerating materials science that has identified hundreds of thousands of candidate materials with potential uses in energy, transport and clean water.
Walker closed with an appeal to leaders to act on stated ambitions. “European leaders say AI leadership is at the top of their agenda—and it’s time to make those ambitions a reality,” he urged, adding that progress will come from removing regulatory barriers that hold back innovators, accelerating shared research through partnership, and scaling adoption of AI tools so Europe can boost growth and remain competitive with geopolitical rivals such as China.