The president of the ECB, Christine Lagarde, stated in Vienna that artificial intelligence can increase European productivity by up to 4% in ten years, but warned that Europe must accelerate its adoption to avoid falling behind the United States.
The president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Christine Lagarde, has placed artificial intelligence (AI) at the centre of the European economic debate. During her speech at the "Hofburg im Dialog – Economy, Europe, Resilience" series, held in Vienna on September 14, 2026, Lagarde noted that this technology represents the best opportunity to boost productivity and sustain the European social model in the face of an ageing population.
According to ECB estimates, a rapid adoption of AI could raise the productivity level by 4% in a decade. Lagarde framed this figure in the context of the Draghi report, which calculated that a 2% increase in productivity would cover up to a third of the fiscal cost of European strategic investments. The information, reported by ecb.europa.eu, indicates that the head of European monetary policy has emphasised that, without this boost, it will be impossible to finance public investment needs and address the reduction in the workforce, which will lose more than a million people per year over the next 25 years.
Data from the ECB shows that companies in the eurozone will allocate around 10% of their total investment to AI in 2026, and that loans linked to this technology accounted for nearly a quarter of the growth in corporate credit in the first quarter of the year. Furthermore, the proportion of eurozone workers using AI in their jobs has doubled in two years and now exceeds 50%, a level that the internet took about a decade to reach.
“The question I want to raise today is whether, this time, Europe will get its share of the benefits. I believe it can. But only if we are clear about why we need this technology, why we cannot simply buy it, and why part of it must be built here,” Lagarde stated.
Despite these advances, the gap with the United States remains significant. In the past two years, US digital investment has grown twice as fast as in the eurozone, and American workers spend two to three times more of their workweek using AI than those in the largest euro economies.
Lagarde warned that Europe will bear part of the cost of this technological boom even if it does not participate in its growth. Major US tech companies issued more than $100 billion in bonds last year, mostly long-term, and now account for nearly one-tenth of new euro-denominated bond issuances by non-financial companies. Since long-term rates in the eurozone move with those in the US, the rise in real long-term yields in the US attributed to AI-linked borrowing will partially transfer to European financing costs.
The ECB president also recalled that households in the eurozone hold around €440 billion in US tech companies, a figure that highlights how European savings are financing digital transformation across the Atlantic. Lagarde insisted that, unlike the era of railways when technology was European and the US adopted it, Europe must now import and adopt technology developed abroad.
The ECB's analysis estimates that more than €100 billion annually is the public part of the strategic investment needs that existing budgets and EU instruments do not cover. Lagarde concluded that AI is the way to close that gap and urged for its implementation to be accelerated so that Europe does not fall behind in the next decade.
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