The European AI initiative faces challenges that startups are uniquely positioned to address: examples from Italy, France, and Lithuania

Saturday, Jul 26, 2025

Il Sole 24 Ore

Europe lags in AI despite investments; Italian startups focus on niche applications like translation and cybersecurity.

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[This is an automatically generated summary, for reference only]

Europe is attempting to close its artificial intelligence gap through investments and projects, but challenges such as data availability and scale are hindering progress, despite major initiatives like a planned €200 billion investment by the European Commission. Italian startups offer potential models for European AI development. One company specializes in AI-enhanced machine translation and is involved in an EU project to create multimodal AI capable of understanding real-world inputs across various fields. Another startup focuses on cybersecurity solutions, arguing that Italy should concentrate on vertical applications of AI within its strong industrial sectors like mechatronics rather than competing with large language models due to energy costs and limited international adoption of the Italian language.

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