Human First, AI Frontier: Europe's Moment to Lead

The Wake-Up Call: Three Reports, One Message

In the span of eighteen months, three landmark analyses converged on the same urgent conclusion: Europe risks becoming a spectator in the most consequential technological transformation in human history. The message is not one of despair but of possibility -- if we choose to act with the ambition that the moment demands.

The first is RAND's 2025 report "Europe and the Geopolitics of AGI: The Need for a Preparedness Plan" [1], which concludes that artificial general intelligence -- systems matching or exceeding humans at most economically useful cognitive work -- is plausibly achievable between 2030 and 2040. Europe, the report warns, "currently lacks sufficient strategic awareness and competitive positioning to navigate this transition."

The second is Mario Draghi's September 2024 report on The Future of European Competitiveness [2], a 400-page diagnosis revealing that EU companies spend EUR 270 billion less on R&I than their American counterparts, that the EU captures just 5% of global venture capital compared to 52% in the US, and that no EU company founded in the last fifty years has reached a market capitalization above EUR 100 billion.

The third is the collective signal from Davos 2026 [3]. An estimated $1.5 trillion in cumulative global AI investment (per WEF analysis citing Gartner estimates [4]) was discussed across infrastructure, compute, and software; AI was framed as a "core economic variable" -- no longer a strategic option but a macroeconomic force -- and Accenture's Julie Sweet articulated what may become the defining principle: "Human in the lead, not human in the loop" [4].

"AI can be Europe's greatest accelerator -- but only if we lead with human values, not follow with regulatory caution."

-- The thesis of this article

The Diagnosis: Where Europe Stands

Let us be clear-eyed about the gap before arguing for how to close it. The data is sobering but not deterministic.

RAND's analysis is especially striking. It identifies Europe's vulnerability across the AI value chain: limited leverage in compute infrastructure, fragmented national strategies, and insufficient competitive positioning for a transition that could reshape economic growth, military capabilities, and international stability [1]. The report recommends an authoritative "AGI Preparedness Report" led by a figure with exceptional political authority and technical credibility.

Draghi frames this as a structural challenge. Around 70% of the per-capita GDP gap between the EU and the US is explained by lower productivity -- and the innovation gap reinforces a "middle technology trap" where Europe specializes in mature technologies with limited breakthrough potential [2]. The European Innovation Council's Pathfinder budget stands at EUR 256 million (2024 work programme), while US ARPA agencies -- DARPA ($4.1B), ARPA-H ($1.5B), and ARPA-E ($0.5B) -- command over USD 6 billion combined in FY2024.

Human First, Not AI First: A European Competitive Identity

Here is where I diverge from the narrative of inevitable decline. The gap is real. But the response Europe offers can be differentiated, powerful, and deeply aligned with what the world actually needs.

At Davos 2026, amid the $1.5 trillion investment frenzy, a counter-narrative emerged with force. The phrase "human in the lead" -- articulated by leaders across business, policy, and civil society -- captures something profound: the organizations and societies that will thrive are not those that deploy AI fastest, but those that deploy it wisest [3].

This is Europe's natural competitive identity. Not "AI first" -- rushing to automate everything and asking questions later -- but "Human First, AI Frontier": placing human agency, dignity, and judgment at the center of every AI deployment, while simultaneously pushing the state of the art with ingenuity and depth.

Consider the evidence. The EU AI Act, despite criticism of its complexity, represents the world's first comprehensive risk-based framework for AI governance [6]. Spain's AESIA became one of the first dedicated national AI supervisory agencies in Europe. The Oxford Insights Government AI Readiness Index 2024 ranks the US first (87.03) and Singapore second (84.25), with France (79.36) competitive at fourth; Spain scores 69.25, near the Western European average of 69.56, reflecting strong government strategy but room to grow in implementation [5]. Europe's strength in regulation, institutional quality, and democratic legitimacy is precisely the infrastructure needed for trustworthy AI at scale.

Spain's Moment: From Strategy to Frontier

Let me speak directly to my fellow Spaniards and to the Spanish ecosystem specifically. Spain's AI journey has been remarkable in ambition and pace. We rank 21st globally in the Tortoise Global AI Index and are consistently among the top nations for government strategy [7]. We have a national AI strategy (ENIA), a supervisory agency (AESIA), one of Europe's first AI regulatory sandboxes, and a draft AI law approved in March 2025 [8].

But strategy documents do not create frontier capabilities. What Spain needs now is a decisive shift from policy design to engineering depth. We need more Spanish engineers contributing to frontier model architectures. We need research groups competing at NeurIPS and ICML. We need startups not just using APIs but pushing the boundaries of what AI can do -- in materials science, in drug discovery, in climate modeling, in language technology for the 580 million Spanish speakers worldwide.

This is not fantasy. Spain has done this before. We built one of Europe's largest renewable energy industries from almost nothing. We created a world-class high-speed rail network. We produce some of the world's best engineers, physicians, and scientists -- many of whom currently advance the frontier at Google, Meta, DeepMind, and OpenAI from abroad. The talent exists. The ambition must match it.

I know this firsthand. When we launched Saturdays.AI, we did not ask permission to democratize AI education -- we simply started teaching, in Spanish, in 12 countries, to 30,000 people who had been told that AI was "not for them." When we built PresidencIA at the Office of the Prime Minister, we did not wait for a perfect strategy -- we started deploying, learning, and iterating. The lesson is always the same: the gap closes when you start moving, not when you finish planning. AI4All is not just a slogan -- it is the conviction that every citizen, every organization, every country deserves access to AI's transformative power.

The AGI Preparedness Imperative

RAND's call for an "AGI Preparedness Report" deserves special attention [1]. The report argues that Europe must prepare for a world where AGI -- however uncertain its exact timeline -- could fundamentally reshape economic growth, military capabilities, and international stability. The authors are explicit: existing EU and Member State strategies "remain fragmented and do not match the potential stakes."

This is not about predicting when AGI arrives. It is about institutional preparedness for a range of scenarios. The US has already launched the Genesis Mission (November 2025) [9], a national effort to use AI to double scientific productivity in a decade, supported by the full infrastructure of the Department of Energy's national laboratories. China's Next Generation AI Development Plan has operated since 2017.

Europe's response? According to RAND, insufficient. The report proposes that a preparedness plan should be led by "a figure with exceptional political authority and technical credibility, supported by a world-class team." This is a direct challenge to European leadership. It is also an opportunity: the nation or group of nations that produces this plan with the most rigor and ambition will set the terms of the debate.

"The emergence of AGI could reshape economic growth, military capabilities, and international stability, while intensifying competitive and coercive dynamics among nations. Europe currently lacks sufficient strategic awareness and competitive positioning to navigate this transition."

-- RAND, "Europe and the Geopolitics of AGI" (2025) [1]

The Davos Signal: Beyond Hype, Into Infrastructure

Davos 2026 marked a turning point in how the global elite discusses AI. The era of fascination has given way to the era of implementation -- and the era of reckoning [3].

Three signals from Davos are particularly relevant for European strategy:

First, AI investment is now macroeconomic infrastructure. The $1.5 trillion invested globally in AI is not speculative froth -- it is foundational economic input. Data centers, compute clusters, energy systems, and software platforms are being built at a scale that reshapes national GDP calculations. BlackRock's Larry Fink stated plainly that he sees no bubble [3]. For Europe, this means that underinvesting in AI infrastructure is equivalent to underinvesting in electricity in the 1920s.

Second, the "trust overhang" is real. Agentic AI -- systems that plan, decide, and execute autonomously -- can already outperform human operators in many domains. But organizations have not evolved the accountability, governance, and assurance mechanisms to deploy them safely. This is where Europe's regulatory expertise becomes a genuine competitive asset, not merely a compliance burden [3].

Third, the skills crisis is accelerating. Entry-level workers face 30% task automation exposure. The WEF's Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that 86% of employers anticipate AI will drive business transformation [10]. Europe must invest massively in reskilling -- not as a defensive measure, but as the foundation of a human-centered AI economy.

We Have Done This Before

Every generation faces a moment where a new technology threatens to overwhelm existing institutions. And every time, the civilizations that thrived were not those that retreated from the frontier, but those that approached it with ingenuity, depth, and moral clarity.

Europe invented the university system, built the scientific method, created the Enlightenment framework that underpins modern democracy, and led the industrial revolutions that transformed human welfare. Spain's own history is one of extraordinary ventures: from the navigation breakthroughs that opened global trade routes, to the engineering achievements of modern infrastructure, to the intellectual contributions of figures like Santiago Ramon y Cajal -- the father of modern neuroscience and a Nobel laureate who mapped the human brain with hand-drawn illustrations more than a century before neural networks bore his metaphor.

The AI frontier is not alien territory. It is the latest chapter in a story of human ingenuity meeting new capability. The question is not whether Europe can compete at the frontier. The question is whether we choose to.

A Call to Action: Five Commitments

I propose five commitments for European citizens, organizations, and especially the Spanish ecosystem:

Conclusion: The Optimist's Case

I write this as someone who has spent a career at the intersection of AI and public service -- building educational programs across 12 countries with Saturdays.AI, deploying AI systems in government at the Office of the Prime Minister of Spain, and advising organizations from defense to energy on how to make AI work in the real world.

I am optimistic. Not naively -- the data from RAND and Draghi is serious, and the Davos signals demand urgency. But optimistic because I have seen what happens when European talent meets real ambition. I have seen Spanish engineers build world-class systems. I have seen communities of 30,000 alumni come together to democratize AI education. I have seen governments move with surprising speed when the stakes are clear.

The stakes could not be clearer. AGI may be a decade away. The competitiveness gap is measured in hundreds of billions. The global AI economy is being built now, at $1.5 trillion per year and accelerating.

Europe can lead this. Spain can lead this. But only if we stop debating whether to compete and start competing. Human first. AI frontier. Now.