European Commissioner Henna VIRKKUNEN in Lisbon, Portugal
10 November 2026
Contents updated on 10 Nov 2026
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European Commission
Follow its sittings00:00 - 00:29
Speaker 1
Yes. Thank you very much, honorable chairs, honorable members. It's a great pleasure to be here in this morning together with you in this very beautiful house and this room. Already this year earlier, I had the pleasure of welcoming the President of the Portuguese Parliament in Brussels. And next week, I will also welcome the members of the Committee of Constitutional Affairs in Brussels.
00:29 - 01:18
Speaker 2
And today, I have this great honor too of speaking to this joint session of the European Affairs Committee and Economy and Territorial Cohesion Committee. And I think that this very clearly tells that we have very good dialogue with the Portuguese Parliament and it's very much needed and it's very important. I'm planning that now in my opening remarks, I will especially focus to role of technologies and especially to artificial intelligence. But after that, I'm very willing, of course, to hear more about your priorities and your questions. As you know, honorable members, that artificial intelligence is no longer a distant promise, it's already reshaping now our economies, our public services and also the balance of global power nowadays.
01:18 - 03:37
Speaker 3
So the question before us is not whether AI will transform our societies, because it will. The real question is that who will shape that transformation, according to which values and in whose interest. And for Europe and for Portugal, this is not only a technological debate. It is a very political and also economic choice. A choice about our competitiveness, and a choice about our sovereignty, and a choice about whether the next wave of innovation will strengthen our industry, modernize our public administration, improve our hospitals and schools, and create quality jobs for our citizens, or whether we will simply import technologies developed elsewhere and accept dependence.
When we look this sector, I think it's important to underline that Europe starts from a position of strength here, because we have world-class universities, we have outstanding researchers, we have very talented engineers, and a powerful industrial base. And Portugal has real assets to bring to this European effort, because you have very dynamic digital ecosystem, very strong scientific capacity, growing technological ambition, and also a very clear commitment to reform. And that is why I warmly welcome the Portuguese National Digital Strategy Action Plan, because it shows the ambition must be matched by delivery, with very concrete measures, clear priorities and a determination to turn innovation into results for citizens and for businesses. And now we must move from potential to scale. And that is the ambition behind our European AI continent and our Apply AI Strategy: to accelerate both the development and the uptake of AI across European industry and public services, thereby strengthening our competitiveness, our productivity and innovation.
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