The following analysis is based on the interview with Biljana Weber, Senior Vice President and Managing Director for Northern Western Europe at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), conducted during the Adopt-AI 2025 conference. The central insight emerging from this conversation is that artificial intelligence in Europe is no longer entering an experimental phase, but moving into a much more demanding moment in which leaders must stop observing the technology from a distance and finally transform their organizations. This inflection point has nothing to do with a press-release effect; it is visible in the real strategic decisions taken today by companies aiming to move from pilots to full-scale adoption.
A strategic shift: from experimentation to integration
Europe finds itself at a moment when AI is no longer a slogan but a cultural, economic, and political infrastructure. Bijana Weber highlights the extent to which the Nordic countries, with adoption rates twice the European average, embody operational maturity, while France—despite its excellence in research and sovereign AI—lags behind when it comes to implementing solutions at scale. This reveals a truth often obscured in public messaging: what is lacking is neither expertise nor technology, but organizational capacity to change habits, procedures, and the very idea that AI is not an additional feature but a profound shift in governance.
Regulation and competitiveness: the EU AI Act as an accelerator
One of the paradoxes in the interview is the way Bijana Weber overturns the dominant argument claiming that regulation slows innovation. The EU AI Act is not a wall, but a springboard, because it creates a framework in which trust becomes a global competitive advantage. The real question is no longer “Will regulation slow us down?” but “To what extent will it create value?” AI developed according to European standards immediately earns the credibility required for deployment internationally. Digital sovereignty takes concrete form in projects like Asgard, a supercomputer designed for the Ministry of the Armed Forces with HPE and Orange, showing that security and efficiency are not opposites, but the foundations of state strategy.
The scaling challenge: culture, trust, and transformation
Generalized adoption does not occur by decree; it is achieved through a progressive and intentional transformation of organizations. Leaders no longer fear missing the AI shift, they now fear not being able to help their teams absorb innovation. Bijana Weber insists that only organizations with real governance—involving data quality, clarity of roles, and process transparency—manage to move beyond pilots. Remaining in incremental improvement is another way of preserving the old world, while aiming for platforms, governed data, and sovereignty becomes a reinvention of value creation itself.
The network: a strategic blind spot and a key to success
The most surprising part of the interview is perhaps this reflection on networking. When people talk about AI today, they mention computing power, GPUs, models, cloud, and data security. Very few mention the invisible structure that makes it all work: the network fabric. Bijana Weber articulates it with striking clarity: the network is not a technical background, but a nervous system determining latency, security, flows, and the final quality of any AI solution. From this perspective, HPE’s acquisition of Juniper becomes a strategic act rather than a simple financial announcement. AI performance is not only about what happens inside servers, but about what circulates between them.
The remaining choice: improve or transform
Everything comes down to a leadership choice, and the interview poses the question without ambiguity. Should a leader become someone who simply improves existing processes, or someone who transforms the organization to make it a credible global player in the decade ahead? Europe does not lack resources or talent; it lacks leaders convinced that AI is not a tool but a new way to produce meaning, trust, and value. As shown by the Asgard example and the breadth of Biljana Weber’s reasoning during Adopt-AI 2025, the future depends on integration, governance, and remembering what connects everything.
Source: interview with Bijana Weber during the Adopt-AI 2025 conference (Senior Vice President and Managing Director for Northern Western Europe, Hewlett Packard Enterprise – HPE).
Questions leaders should be asking
At this stage, every organization can reflect. Is AI still conceived as a standalone technical project, or is it beginning to drive a deeper transformation at company level? Are data treated as living resources, with clear governance, or do they remain a disordered legacy exploited opportunistically? Do executive decisions genuinely take into account team readiness, with a vision for confidence, understanding, and skills development?
It is also worth asking whether the network is considered as strategically important as models and computing power. Can the organization anticipate latency, security, and sovereignty challenges that condition the real success of AI solutions? Finally, is the EU AI Act perceived as a constraint to circumvent, or as a framework to create value, trust, and competitive positioning at a global scale?
These questions are not intended to provide immediate answers. They indicate a path—one in which leaders do not merely improve what already exists, but choose to transform their organizations to fully enter the economy of trusted AI.
