On 9 April 2025, the European Commission unveiled the AI Continent Action Plan, an ambitious programme to position the EU as a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI). The initiative responds to Mario Draghi’s 2024 competitiveness report, which warned that Europe must step up investment, simplify regulation and pursue a coordinated industrial policy if it is to close the innovation gap with the United States and China.
Building on Draghi’s recommendations, the Commission had already published the Competitiveness Compass in January 2025. That roadmap focuses on three pillars: closing the innovation gap, decarbonising the economy and reducing strategic dependencies. The AI Continent Action Plan turns those goals into action through five linked initiatives:
- Infrastructure expansion: Public-private partnerships will create up to five AI gigafactories for developing and training advanced models, backed by a €20bn InvestAI facility.
- Data access and sharing: A forthcoming Data Union Strategy (due H2 2025) will boost the volume, quality and interoperability of data available to developers across the single market.
- Sectoral AI adoption: Targeted incentives will embed AI in healthcare, transport and public services, driving productivity and better outcomes for citizens.
- Talent development: Expanded education and training programmes will build the skilled workforce Europe needs to lead in AI.
- Regulatory simplification: The Commission pledges to streamline existing rules governing AI development and deployment while maintaining high ethical and consumer-protection standards.
Below we focus on the proposed regulatory simplification and what it may mean for compliance with the AI Act.
Grounds for regulatory simplification
Regulation has grown dense in recent years. The 2019–24 legislative cycle produced a patchwork of digital rules that often overlap or even conflict, creating duplicated procedures and complex supervisory structures at EU and national level. The AI Act adds another demanding layer: rigorous risk-management, transparency and incident-reporting duties for high-risk systems and general-purpose AI models. Many of these obligations mirror or resemble existing requirements under the GDPR and other EU data laws, amplifying cost and complexity. Draghi’s 2024 report highlights this regulatory burden as a barrier hampering innovation.
The Action Plan therefore promises to make the AI Act ‘workable’ in practice. To that end, the Commission will publish templates, guidelines and implementing regulation, and will open up direct lines of communication through an AI Act Service Desk in the new AI Office. Just as important, it will pause to assess the Act’s real-world impact before proposing additional AI legislation.
There are many redundancies between the AI Act, GDPR and other EU data laws which rule makers could tackle as they implement the Action Plan. Three pain points stand out:
- Incident reporting. Stringent rules and obligations – found in the GDPR, the e-Privacy regime, NIS 2 and now the AI Act – set demanding timelines and oblige businesses to notify multiple authorities. A single reporting portal or harmonised template could redirect resources from red tape to incident response.
- Risk assessments. Extensive documentation duties, risk and impact assessments run across several statutes. Clear guidance on how companies can reuse analysis would reduce duplication and may create synergies between overlapping requirements.
- Competing competencies. Overlapping supervisory competences mean that businesses often have to deal with several regulators that look into the same activities and into very similar obligations, potentially resulting in different approaches. Streamlining processes would increase legal certainty and cut costs for both businesses and public authorities.
The incoming Commission has recognized the need to lighten the compliance load even before some rules take full effect. How far it will go remains to be seen, but the direction of travel is clear: fewer hurdles, more clarity and a regulatory environment that lets Europe’s AI innovators compete – and thrive – on a global stage.