CEPS Ideas Lab: How can Europe prepare for the autonomous AI agent economy?

On 2 March 2026 2nd AI takes the stage at CEPS IDEAS Lab . As AI agents move from concept to deployment, the urgency of understanding the world they are reshaping has never been greater. While AI systems deliver significant productivity gains and deeply transform knowledge work, questions around privacy, agency, accountability, and control remain. The pace of change is accelerating, and no single perspective can provide effective answers. The composition of this panel, moderated by AI World´s Director and CEPS Chief Data Scientist, Pierre-Alexandre Balland, is a direct response to this new reality.

1. Clemens Wasner brings the builder's perspective. As CEO of enliteAI and founder of AI Austria, he has spent nearly a decade mapping Austria's AI ecosystem and translating ground-level intelligence into EU-level policy advocacy, making him well-placed to diagnose where AI deployment meets institutional resistance.

2. Frank Neffke shifts the lens to research. His work at IT:U Linz and the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna uses Network science and large-scale data to understand how firms and regions develop new capabilities, providing the analytical backbone for assessing whether Europe's AI bets are realistic or wishful thinking.

3. Where Neffke offers the map, Ao Kong offers an international point. Operating across five continents at the intersection of diplomacy, investing, and frontier technology, she brings rare insight into how innovation scales across borders and what it takes to align institutions, capital, and technology at speed.

4. Closing the loop, Friederike Schürer draws on her experience leading data governance at UNICEF, UN Global Pulse, and the Ada Lovelace Institute to ask what meaningful accountability looks like when autonomous systems make decisions across organisational and national boundaries.

CEPS Ideas Lab shows thus once again that the most consequential questions, AI included, are never about one perspective alone, and can only be understood, and answered, as a whole.