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Europe excels at inventing the future but struggles to integrate it. In Brainport Eindhoven, breakthrough technologies collide with infrastructure limits, labour mismatches and institutional inertia. The Missing Middle reveals where innovation becomes friction — and where technological transitions are ultimately won or lost.
Poland’s mobile market is among the most competitive in Central Europe. Mobile penetration exceeds 120% and consumers routinely consume massive amounts of data at extremely low prices — often 50GB for the cost of a premium coffee in Amsterdam. Yet the ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) remains among the lowest in Europe.
For more than a year, Europe has been debating competitiveness, investment and strategic autonomy. At the centre of that debate stands Mario Draghi — not as a politician, but as a system thinker with rare institutional authority.
For years, the evolution of mobile networks followed a familiar logic: faster radios, denser cells, smarter cores. Each generation promised better performance, greater efficiency and new services. Artificial intelligence, at first glance, appears to be the next step in that same lineage — another tool to optimise an already complex system.
While much of the global AI conversation is dominated by American hyperscalers and Chinese platform giants, a quieter — yet arguably more consequential — transformation is unfolding in Europe. At the center of this shift stands Siemens, a company better known for turbines, factories and rail systems than for artificial intelligence. Yet today, Siemens is emerging as one of Europe’s most strategically important AI actors, not by chasing consumer AI dominance, but by embedding intelligence deep into the continent’s industrial and infrastructural backbone. This is not AI as spectacle. It is AI as system logic.
Salesforce’s introduction of Agentforce 360 marks a new phase in the evolution of artificial intelligence inside organisations. Rather than positioning AI as a standalone automation layer, the concept of the “Agentic Enterprise” frames AI agents as collaborators: systems designed to support employees in decision-making, coordination and execution. While this approach is technologically ambitious, its European rollout reveals challenges that go far beyond software adoption.
For decades, ICT distributors played a largely technical and operational role in Europe’s digital economy. They moved hardware and software efficiently through the market, provided credit and logistics and remained mostly invisible to end users. Their importance was measured in scale and reliability, not strategy. That role is now fundamentally changing.
Europe has long invested in systems like DigiD in the Netherlands to help citizens prove who they are online. Yet recent developments show how fragile this trust can be when identity and authentication systems are managed from outside Europe. Now, a French initiative called Authentica offers a new approach — a technology designed to verify the origin of digital creations, from music and images to text, while keeping control firmly in European hands.
