According to Patrik Tovar, Public Policy Manager at Meta for Central and Eastern Europe, artificial intelligence is a key driver of digital innovation. In his talk, he presented how AI is already transforming products for billions of users and increasing companies’ productivity, as well as why Meta advocates an open approach to models. He also pointed out that European regulation will decide the availability of new services and the region’s competitiveness.
Meta and Artificial Intelligence: Benefits and Practice
Meta has been deploying artificial intelligence in its applications for roughly ten years, and today a large part of the user experience is built on it. For example, on Instagram a significant share of content is recommended by algorithms, which is meant to increase relevance for more than three billion users of its platforms. AI also powers new creative tools—from generating images from text to solutions that help companies better reach their audiences.
The benefits also show up in business productivity, from small and medium-sized companies to major brands. According to internal analyses, using AI tools can save some teams up to five hours of work per week, which adds up to a noticeable time saving over the course of a year. The result is faster campaigns, more precise targeting, and a greater focus on the content itself instead of manual operations.
Open Approach and Connection to the Metaverse
Meta emphasizes an open approach to large language models. Llama 2 was created in collaboration with Microsoft and is already used by several companies; the example of Zoom was mentioned, where the model summarizes meetings and creates a task list so participants can focus on the discussion. According to the presentation, making models openly available to the research community before commercialization helps uncover errors more quickly and increase safety and reliability.
The metaverse is not exiting the stage; AI is meant to be its driving force. This is illustrated by Meta’s smart glasses with an assistant that can recognize objects and provide information or suggest a recipe based on the ingredients in the fridge. However, according to the speaker, these features will not be available in the European Union at the moment, due to current regulatory requirements and the fragmentation of the digital market.
The European Challenge: Regulation and Opportunities for the Region
The future of innovation in Europe will depend on how effectively the adopted rules are implemented and whether the single digital market is completed. The talk warned of the risk that excessive or inconsistent regulation will slow the availability of services and weaken competitiveness, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. According to the speaker, Europe lags in AI investment and has weak representation among the largest global companies, which calls for closer cooperation between the public and private sectors.
Nevertheless, the Central and Eastern European region has much to show. AR/VR technologies are already used for employee training, in automotive development, and for defect detection, and in the Czech Republic a virtual nuclear power plant project has been created as an educational tool. From Slovakia, the company Virtual Medicine was mentioned, which made it into the Impact is Real campaign; similar stories show the potential when innovation is opened up to a broader ecosystem. Estimates cited in the talk say that by 2031 the metaverse alone could bring the EU as much as hundreds of billions of euros, which is why it is important to set the rules so that talent and companies stay and grow at home.
