When you ask François Bitouzet, Managing Director of Viva Tech, where Europe stands in the global technology race, he refuses to play along with the prevailing pessimism. “We are better than sometimes we think we are,” he told the ConsEUmer podcast, pushing back against the wave of “Europe bashing” that has come to dominate discussions about the continent’s innovation ecosystem.
Bitouzet is in a strong position to make that argument. Viva Tech, now celebrating its tenth edition this June, has grown into the largest tech and business event in Europe. Last year it welcomed more than 180,000 visitors from 170 countries, bringing together 14,000 startups, tech giants like Meta, IBM, Microsoft, and OpenAI, alongside policymakers and corporate leaders. The premise from day one, he explained, was to remind the world that innovation does not begin and end in Silicon Valley or Shenzhen.
The AI Conversation Europe Wants to Have
This year, AI will inevitably be the headline act. But Bitouzet is clear about what kind of AI conversation Viva Tech wants to host. “We have tech gurus telling you what will happen in 30 years when we live like a Matrix or on Mars,” he said. “To be honest with you, we don’t care. What we want to see is really the concrete outcomes from AI.” That means how AI is reshaping production, sales, service design, and work itself, rather than abstract futurism.
Running alongside the business focus is a harder conversation about geopolitics and sovereignty. The United States remains the leader in tech, Bitouzet acknowledged, though “we are not sure to still understand their leadership.” China has graduated from challenger to leader. In between sit regional champions: Canada, Korea, Nigeria, Africa, and Europe itself. The question Viva Tech wants attendees to grapple with is what the “new atlas of innovation” actually looks like.
Where Europe Actually Stands
Bitouzet is honest about Europe’s weaknesses. The continent lacks champions in foundational layers like hardware and operating systems. There is no European Nvidia, Meta, or Windows. But he ticked off a list of players that deserve more recognition: Spotify, Zalando, and Revolut in consumer markets; Mistral, SAP, OVH, and the remarkable Dutch firm ASML, whose machines print the chips that everyone else’s chips depend on.
Europe’s bigger problem, in his view, is structural. Talented Europeans graduate from European universities and head to Silicon Valley for better wages, bigger projects, and the gravitational pull of the place itself. European startups grow well to around the €100–200 million mark, then stall, because the European market remains fragmented along national lines and risk capital is scarce. The result is an absurd cycle: European savings flow to the US, where they fund American investors who then buy promising European startups and relocate them. “It’s even worse than this,” Bitouzet said. “We use our money or capital savings in the US and thanks to this money that we send them, they invest in our startups and they bring them to the US.”
The Fixes, and Why AI Is a Reset
His prescriptions are concrete. Europe needs a true single market for startups, ideally through the proposed “28th regime” unifying legal frameworks across member states. It needs unified capital markets so European savings can fund European innovation. And it needs a shared political vision treating tech sovereignty as a continental priority through 2050.
The reason for optimism, he argued, is AI itself. With foundation models and chips heading toward commoditization, the real competitive game is application. “With AI, we start from zero again,” he said.
Advice for the Next Generation
Asked what he would tell a 17-year-old uncertain about which field to enter, Bitouzet rejected the question’s premise. The answer is not picking the right job, but learning to think. “The people who will hold responsibilities tomorrow,” he said, “are not the people who will be completely blocked on TikTok and just using AI to know if they have to turn or left or right. It’s the people who will think.”