This week’s AI Action Summit, which brought together world leaders and business titans to France, has a singular message: The global focus will be on supporting artificial intelligence (AI) growth and innovation, which may boost the economy and drive business expansion across industries.
The sentiment is strikingly different from the themes of the last two of the annual summits. These were focused on putting guardrails on AI, with the first one hosted by the U.K. and aptly called “The AI Safety Summit 2023.”
This year, the EU and France have taken a different approach. They have pledged €200 billion ($207 billion) and €109 billion ($112 billion) toward AI, respectively. French President Emmanuel Macron also called for less red tape and faster innovation as the EU seeks to catch up to the U.S. and China.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance noted the shift in sentiment. “I’m not here this morning to talk about AI safety, which was the title of the conference a couple of years ago,” he said in a speech at the summit in Paris. “I’m here to talk about AI opportunity.”
Vance said AI would have “revolutionary” applications in economic innovation, job creation, national security, health care and beyond. While this doesn’t mean safety isn’t important, “focus matters, and we must focus now on the opportunity to catch lightning in a bottle,” he added.
At the summit, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai urged governments to craft public policy that “addresses risks, without stymieing innovation.” He asked them to tap existing laws and fill in gaps instead of creating entirely new laws. Pichai also sought uniformity of global AI regulations to ease business compliance while taking a “thoughtful, strategic” overall approach.
Vincent Gusdorf, assistant managing director of digital finance and AI analytics at Moody’s Ratings, thinks France’s AI ambitions are too high.
While its AI investment and endeavors are “impressive, they won’t enable France to compete head-on with larger countries like the United States and China, which have bigger domestic markets, laxer data rules, and larger tech companies,” Gusdorf told PYMNTS.com. “Consequently, France will likely focus its efforts on areas where it has a competitive advantage.”
Stephen Feline, director of North America for London and Partners, an economic development group in London, told PYMNTS.com that the U.K. can’t match the U.S. in market size and available funding. But it does have at least one key advantage: It is open to talented immigrants.
Feline said the uncertainty around U.S. restrictions on work visas even for skilled immigrants could make them consider London as an option. Moreover, London is already home to AI stars like DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, and U.S. tech giants have opened major hubs in the city, he said.
Feline added that $3.5 billion has been invested in AI startups in London in 2024, which is “more than anywhere in Europe.” Last month, the U.K. government’s “AI Opportunities Action Plan” that aims to integrate AI across sectors, has attracted over £14 billion ($17.4 billion) in investment, he said.
The U.K. also is building its own Silicon Valley by creating an innovation hub connecting Cambridge and Oxford universities, Feline said. This includes constructing faster trains to link their two cities, adding housing, and other efforts. Feline said startups spun out of universities will also need access to capital and learn how to commercialize their inventions.
While the U.K.’s pro-worker Labour Party is in charge currently, Feline said “they’re making growth a linchpin of their whole platform.” He believes Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government will treat AI the same way.
While governments figure out how to balance safety with growth in crafting AI regulations, companies are already deploying and seeing AI’s benefits.
In financial services, for example, Feline said AI will further accelerate the automation of back-end office functions at banks like JPMorgan Chase and HSBC. In securities trading systems, using AI is going to further speed up trade executions. For fund managers and analysts, AI will help them stay on top of trends by scouring the market and doing research.
Feline sees AI similarly boosting efficiency and productivity in other industries, such as business services (law, accounting) and health care.
The result is that “the head count that will be required in areas like financial services will be dramatically reduced” but it will be “good for shareholder value,” Feline said.
However, Feline believes that overall job count would not be decimated by AI because people will go on to do other, higher-performing work. He said that after Brexit, financial services jobs in London were not much affected. Employees laid off from big financial services firms found employment with FinTech companies, hedge funds, and other smaller organizations.
