At the Hello Tomorrow Global Summit, held on 11 and 12 June 2026 at the NDSM wharf in Amsterdam for the first time, attracting over three thousand attendees, the report ‘Deep Dive: Strategic Investing in Europe’s Nextgen AI’ was presented. Authored by Stefan Leijnen of Utrecht University of Applied Sciences and supported by the EU and InvestEU, the report argues that Europe should not attempt to match the United States or China on raw scale, but instead focus on trustworthy and efficient AI for practical, domain-specific applications.
The report identifies a fundamental shift in the AI sector: economic value is increasingly determined not by further scaling large language models, but by deploying AI in specific industrial and scientific contexts. According to the report, Europe holds high-quality data and deep expertise in sectors including manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, robotics, energy, biotech and fintech. This constitutes a strategic advantage that investors and policymakers can actively leverage.
The report identifies reliability, data quality, energy efficiency, privacy-by-design, open models and edge computing as key priorities for European AI development. The emphasis on trustworthiness aligns with Europe’s existing regulatory framework and broader societal expectations around AI. In doing so, the report positions Europe not as a laggard, but as a region with a distinct and differentiated direction within global AI development.
Read also
