Murtra warns in opposition to European “naivety”: technological sovereignty requires scale and its personal AI | Economy | EUROtoday

Within the framework of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in 2026, the chief president of Telefónica, Marc Murtra, has issued some of the extreme warnings of the day concerning the digital way forward for the continent. During his participation within the spherical desk What does strategic technological sovereignty imply for Europe?Murtra has identified that solely essentially the most naive sectors of society and politics can consider that Europe will keep assured entry to essentially the most cutting-edge variations of Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the subsequent decade. This message, geared toward regulators and political leaders, highlights a crucial vulnerability for crucial industries comparable to prescription drugs and manufacturing, which is able to rely on these superior instruments for his or her future competitiveness. “It is naive to think that we Europeans will have access to the most advanced AI products that will be needed within 10 years for, for example, the pharmaceutical or manufacturing industry,” he mentioned.

Murtra’s concern just isn’t restricted to business availability, however delves into the implications of nationwide safety and sovereignty. The supervisor has warned that the fixed use of third-party software program and expertise carries the danger that these instruments can be used for functions outdoors of European pursuits and values. In this sense, he has made an implicit reference to the state of affairs within the United States with firms like Anthropic, mentioning that the political energy of different areas may impose makes use of of AI that compromise the privateness or safety of people to the detriment of European requirements. To counteract this development, the president of the Spanish telecom firm has insisted that Europe can’t be happy with being a easy infrastructure supplier; It should develop its personal merchandise and promote the emergence of hyperscalers that assist an unbiased digital economic system.

Strategic autonomy, in response to Murtra, inevitably includes the management of cybersecurity. This includes not solely managing protection instruments, but additionally deeply understanding them to defend programs from exterior interference. However, the creation of this ecosystem faces vital structural limitations: though Europe has the technical information or know-howpresently lacks the orchestration essential to launch digital merchandise which can be extraordinarily advanced and costly to copy.

Therefore, the recipe proposed by Murtra is predicated on three pressing pillars: gaining scale, attracting the perfect expertise and making deep technological investments. Regarding the function of regulators, criticism has been direct concerning administrative slowness within the face of technological acceleration. Murtra highlighted that, whereas AI has undergone revolutionary modifications within the final three months, the regulatory framework has not proven progress within the final 12 months.

From their perspective, regulation should take a 180-degree flip to prioritize the creation of expertise over some other regulatory facet. To obtain this, it proposes a “social contract” the place operators are allowed to realize scale and consolidate the market in change for large investments in innovation. According to the supervisor, this consolidation mannequin is a “quick victory” that will have a optimistic influence on the standard of service and costs, following profitable examples seen in powers comparable to China, India, Brazil or the United States.

Internally, Telefónica is already executing a radical transformation to align with this imaginative and prescient of the longer term. Murtra defined that the corporate is actively abandoning applied sciences and enterprise items that it considers out of date to pay attention its capabilities on upcoming strategic sectors. This new group seeks to be extra vertical and have an actual influence, which forces the corporate to take what he defines as “calculated risks.” This change in mentality implies accepting that lots of the selections made might not be appropriate, a actuality that the president himself claims to simply accept as a part of the method of institutional evolution.

Finally, Murtra has urged Europe to be taught from the American and Chinese fashions, the place giant technological oligopolies always reinvest in deep innovation. The proposal of the president of Telefónica is obvious: to depart behind the stage of naivety, Europe should enable its firms to function with the dimensions essential to compete globally. Only on this manner can or not it’s assured that the continent isn’t just a spectator of different individuals’s technological progress, however quite a creator of its personal options that guarantee its financial relevance and the safety of its residents within the new digital order.