06 July 2026

Europe's 2030 digital targets were set in a different era, and the technology, the geopolitics and the investment landscape have all shifted considerably since. The European Internet Forum gathered researchers, industry representatives and civil society voices to assess how much progress has actually been made, where the gaps are widest, and what practical steps could turn the Digital Decade's ambitions into measurable outcomes before the decade runs out.

Digital Decade Review

 

Opening Remarks 

Michael McNamara MEP opened by acknowledging that the Digital Decade has delivered a coherent framework for Europe's digital transformation, but that the midterm review must go beyond measuring progress and ask harder questions about whether the targets, governance structures and investment priorities remain fit for purpose. He noted areas of genuine advance: basic 5G coverage is approaching universal levels, AI adoption among businesses is growing, and more Europeans now hold basic digital skills. Against that, he warned that Europe remains off track on ICT specialist shortages, cloud and AI uptake, high capacity network rollout and semiconductor market share. Artificial intelligence has matured from an emerging technology into a strategic economic driver, he stressed, and digital infrastructure is now inseparable from European competitiveness and security, making the stakes of getting the review right considerably higher than when the programme was first adopted.

Industry Perspectives

Drawing on a survey of 34,000 respondents across 14 member states and three non-EU countries, Claudia Anderson of Strand Partners presented a picture of accelerating but uneven AI adoption in Europe. For the first time, over half of European businesses are consistently using AI, and 4.4 million businesses adopted it for the first time in the past year, with the majority viewing adoption as a growth priority. The concern, she argued, lies beneath that headline figure: most businesses remain at a basic adoption stage, using off-the-shelf tools for incremental efficiency gains, while only 22% have progressed to advanced adoption, integrating AI deeply into operations or building proprietary models, a figure that grew by just one percentage point from the previous year. Advanced adopters are 55% more likely to report significant productivity gains, yet the barriers holding businesses back are unchanged: regulatory complexity absorbing 42 cents of every euro spent on IT, a persistent shortage of AI and digital skills, and insufficient access to growth capital. Most strikingly, 38% of European startups surveyed said they would consider relocating to scale elsewhere, pointing to clearer regulation, more accessible funding and greater ability to scale as the three conditions that would encourage them to stay.

Laszlo Toth of GSMA situated the infrastructure challenge in stark comparative terms: only 3% of 5G users in Europe are connected via standalone networks, against 30% in the United States, over 50% in India and around 80% in China. Without 5G standalone, the low latency and programmability needed to support AI, smart manufacturing and cloud services cannot be delivered, and data traffic across European mobile internet has already grown by 550% since 2018, with comparable growth forecast ahead. Catching up with leading global markets would require €475 billion in mobile network investment over the next decade, yet operators can currently anticipate mobilising only around €270 billion, leaving a gap of over €200 billion. Toth argued that the Digital Networks Act offers a genuine opportunity to address this shortfall, particularly through longer or infinite spectrum licences, automatic renewals and smarter spectrum pricing, measures that could affect more than 500 licences up for renewal across Europe over the coming decade. He also called for the open internet rules, developed before 5G and AI, to be modernised to remove what he described as regulatory collateral damage for enterprise connectivity and network slicing, stressing that the policy choices made in this legislative mandate will have consequences well beyond connectivity.

Teresa Calvano of the Wi-Fi Alliance made the case that Europe's AI ambitions rest on a connectivity layer that has been largely invisible in Brussels policy discussions. Half of all AI-driven enterprise traffic runs over wireless campus networks, which in practice means Wi-Fi, yet the technology is absent from European digital policy frameworks in any meaningful way. Recent research involving 3,400 IT and networking leaders found that AI-driven network traffic grew 34% last year, is expected to double in the next twelve months and triple within three years, while nearly three quarters of organisations already face or anticipate network capacity limitations within two years. Calvano argued that fibre rollout and 5G coverage alone are insufficient indicators of digital readiness because broadband does not end at the building: it ends at the device, and Wi-Fi is the final link in the connectivity chain that makes high-speed infrastructure usable in factories, hospitals, universities and public services. Her recommendation to the Commission was to incorporate in-building metrics into Digital Decade monitoring, including the percentage of premises where Wi-Fi can deliver gigabit connectivity and the amount of harmonised unlicensed spectrum available, and to formally recognise Wi-Fi's role in European digital infrastructure in the Digital Networks Act, including access to the upper 6 GHz band.

Civil Society Perspectives

David Mekkaoui of All Digital reframed the digital skills debate around the 40% of Europeans who still lack basic digital skills, a figure that, he warned, risks growing rather than shrinking if current trends in MFF negotiations reduce the priority given to digital inclusion. All Digital trained 2.5 million people across Europe last year, a significant number that nonetheless represents a modest dent in the scale of the problem. Using the example of his father-in-law in rural Romania to make the stakes concrete, he argued that digital exclusion is not an abstract policy failure but a daily barrier to health, family connection, economic participation and civic life. He proposed a concrete and cost-neutral solution: a mandatory 10% digital inclusion component in all EU-funded calls, whether focused on cybersecurity, AI, smart cities or 5G, ensuring that every technology project also builds the human capacity to use what it deploys. The difference between a project and a programme, he concluded, is continuity, and Europe needs sustained programmes rather than a succession of short-cycle initiatives that restart from zero every two or three years.

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