Insights

The Value Gap: Generative AI, Governance and the European Enterprise

Seven in ten euro-area firms use AI. However, only one in fourteen does so significantly. The distance between those two numbers has become a management problem with a fixed legal deadline.

Task-level gains from generative AI are large and replicated. By contrast, enterprise returns are rare and, since 27 July 2026, the gap has a calendar of its own: 2 December 2027 for hiring, credit and worker-management systems. The evidence at three scales, the AI Act clock as amended by the Digital Omnibus, the sovereignty ladder, and five steps a good board takes before the deadline.

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The Digital Euro: Who Controls Europe's Money?

Europe is building a public digital currency to reclaim its payments. The hard question is not whether it can, but whether anyone will use it, and at what cost to the banks that must carry it.

On 30 October 2025 the ECB closed the digital euro's preparation phase; the Council and Parliament have now taken their positions, a pilot runs through 2027, and issuance is possible in 2029. Behind the timeline sits the real question: the holding limit, the privacy rules, the bank-cost fight, and a four-cornered contest over who controls Europe's money.

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The Sovereignty Imperative

Why Europe's €800 billion rearmament is not just a defence story — and why most organisations are approaching it wrong.

In March 2025, the European Commission announced Readiness 2030 — a mobilisation of up to €800 billion for European defence. Most analysts read it as a military story. That reading misses the point. At its core, this is a forced reckoning with three decades of accumulated dependency: technological, legal, and institutional.

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