Last week, I attended WMF (We Make Future) in Bologna for the first time.
WMF has become one of Europe’s largest events dedicated to AI, tech and digital innovation, spanning 70,000 square metres at BolognaFiere, nine halls, 90 stages, and bringing together delegations from Silicon Valley to the Gulf to South America.
This year’s theme was ‘Build What Matters’, and Italy’s Ministry of Enterprises, ICE and the city of Bologna all showed up on opening day to say it out loud: WMF now wants to be read as a platform for the country’s industrial system, not just a tech festival.
There was plenty of spectacle to go with that ambition, including humanoid robots on the show floor and a 500-drone light show. But even that couldn’t distract from the question looming over much of the event: who actually gets to lead as AI reshapes what technological strength means across infrastructure, regulation and industry?
Sovereignty is becoming an infrastructure conversation
That question showed up first, and most literally, as infrastructure.
Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission’s Executive Vice-President for tech sovereignty, opened the closing day by naming Brussels’ core priorities: cloud compute, semiconductors, open source and AI infrastructure, pointing to Bologna’s own Cineca supercomputer as proof Europe has pieces to build on.
The remarks came on the same day the Commission moved to preliminarily designate AWS and Azure as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act.
But naming priorities is the easy part; Michiel Scheffer of the European Innovation Council put a number on how hard the rest is: the EIC’s flagship programme has funded 840 companies out of 12,000 applications, against roughly 45,000 startups founded across Europe every year.
He called the scale-up stage a ‘valley of death’, and a panel later that day, with speakers from Thales Alenia Space, 28 Dgtl and Zest Group, made the pragmatic case that Europe should stop pretending it can win everywhere and instead be clearer about what to build, what to buy, and what to share. Quantum computing came up as one of the few places it still can.
Regulation is a live, contested story
The same question played out differently when the conversation turned to regulation: who gets to write the rules, and who decides whether they’re helping or hurting?
On the GovTech stage, Brando Benifei, the Chair of the Delegation responsible for relations with the United States, described the AI Act package as nearly done, including a ban on non-consensual ‘nudifying’ apps arriving in December, fast-tracked after the Grok AI backlash. The second Omnibus package, covering GDPR and the Data Act, is a longer road; Benifei doesn’t expect it to close before mid-2027.
Sitting next to him, lawyer Guido Scorza offered a useful counterweight. His argument was that Europe’s real disadvantage against the US isn’t the rulebook at all; it’s capital, and the fact that American founders get to fail and raise again while European ones often don’t.
He also pointed to something more structural: regulatory language is often so dense that founders need several lawyers just to understand what a law asks of them before they can act on it, limiting who can realistically participate in the first place.
“Made in Italy” is being reframed as a method, not a label
Italy’s answer to that question felt more hopeful, and more grounded in its own industrial strengths. Cosmano Lombardo, whose company organises WMF, built this year’s programme around innovation’s social impact and called Italy “the capital of innovation” for a week, a line that regional and national officials seemed genuinely eager to back up, from Emilia-Romagna’s Tecnopolo to a €500 million cultural-heritage digitisation plan announced by Culture Undersecretary Lucia Borgonzoni.
The message, repeated across several sessions, was that “Made in Italy” needs to become less of a nostalgic label and more of a method, pairing artisanal and research excellence with real industrial capacity, extended into the AI era.
The tone stayed candid about what’s holding that back. Brain drain remains a real obstacle, and Italy’s venture capital scene arrived late to the game and is still comparatively thin, held back by a bureaucratic environment that isn’t built for scaling fast. Political debate, several speakers argued, tends to look backwards rather than treating Made in Italy as a lever for hybridising traditional strengths with AI, despite the opportunity being there. Still, there was real, if cautious, optimism: a new generation of founders and investors is emerging, and Italy’s first unicorns are beginning to appear.
Robotics offered perhaps the clearest example of what that hybridisation can look like in practice. IIT’s ALTER-EGO humanoid platform is already being deployed in a clinical pilot supporting patients with neurodegenerative conditions, while its research lineage has also produced Generative Bionics, a Milan startup with more than 60 humanoid prototypes and €70 million raised to move from the lab into production.
The line that came up most often captured the mood better than any single sector could: Italy alone can’t claim technological sovereignty, but Italy within Europe can carry real weight.
Looking beyond the headlines
By the end of the week, the same question had cropped up repeatedly, whether the discussion was about infrastructure, regulation or industrial identity. It all pointed to the same conclusion: Europe, and Italy within it, is entering a phase where strategic focus matters more than trying to compete everywhere.
The challenge now is deciding where to build, where to buy, and where emerging strengths can be nurtured into globally competitive capabilities.
About the author
Micaela is a Senior Consultant at Tyto, based in Paris, where she supports a diverse portfolio of clients in the French market.