The standard diagnosis of Europe's competitiveness problem is that the continent has stopped inventing. The diagnosis is wrong, and getting it wrong leads to the wrong medicine. Ayisha joined a session convened by EU task force in Brussels to discuss ways to improve Europe’s global competitive positioning.
This EU task force convened recently in Brussels, was chaired by Andrea Renda of the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in collaboration with Max Lemke of the European Commission's DG CONNECT. The session brought leading players from the automotive industry together with global policy experts. Ayisha Piotti, was amongst them to answer a deceptively simple question: how do we make policy practical and implementable, in a way that strengthens Europe's global competitive position?
Where do current safety and liability rules create operational barriers? Is EU policy actually helping or hindering real-world, cross-border testing? Which initiatives are moving the needle, and which need a hard pivot? Out of those questions came a diagnosis worth stating plainly: Europe is brilliant at inventing, prototyping, and piloting. Where it loses ground is in scaling. The gap is not between Europe's ideas and the world's- it is between Europe's pilots and Europe's markets.
From Sandbox to Market: Four Priorities
Closing the deployment gap, the task force concluded, requires urgent progress on four fronts:
- Regulatory harmonization: eliminating the fragmented rules across member states that force companies to navigate twenty-seven variations of the same requirement.
- Cross-border corridors: making real-world testing across European borders seamless, so that a pilot validated in one country does not have to start over in the next.
- Commercial speed: creating fast tracks that move technologies from successful pilots to full market deployment, rather than leaving them stranded in a perpetual sandbox.
- Predictability: building a stable, long-term investment framework that gives businesses the confidence to scale in Europe rather than elsewhere.
The underlying Importance
The deployment-gap diagnosis changes what good policy looks like. If the problem were innovation, the answer would be more research funding and more pilots. Because the problem is deployment, the answer is regulatory coherence, testing infrastructure, and market pathways less glamorous work, but the work that determines whether European technology reaches European citizens at scale. The automotive sector, where safety, liability, and cross-border operation converge, is simply where this truth is most visible; the lesson applies squarely to AI.
It is also a reminder of something RegHorizon sees across every jurisdiction it works in: the binding constraint on technology policy today is rarely ambition, and almost always implementation. The roadmap from Brussels is clear. Now it is about execution.