NextGen Nordics 2025: Leveraging Data and AI on Europe's regulatory landscape

A busy morning and afternoon at NextGen Nordics were rounded off with a keynote presentation by Dr. Igor Mate, Director, Data Privacy and Digital Regulation at Permobil and Co-Chair, Connect Communities.

Permobil, a med-tech company, today faces similar challenges to the financial services industry – particularly around how to address and leverage artificial intelligence (AI) technology, which is heavily regulated in the Nordics region.

“We are in quite good shape,” Mate began, pointing to a December 2024 survey on the financial industry’s adoption of AI in Sweden. It revealed that company-level AI deployment is at around 40%, with employee use of AI at 25%. Preparations for AI regulation, however, is 10%.

“What about managing and mitigating the risks?” Mate asked. “A very minor focus is about the preparation for the EU, AI Act, itself.” While the EU AI Act entered into force on 1 August 1, 2024, it will become fully applicable on 2 August, 2026. This is a comprehensive regulation, so it is incumbent on firms to begin preparing today.

But what are the outputs of those employees that do use AI? According to the survey, most (68%) seem to favour it for searches and information summaries; followed by (58%) for translation; and (52%) for text content generation. Most departments and functions that deploy these tools are “existing workflows and existing processes within the organisation,” Mate observed. “AI is not some magic technology – it is something very human.” Interestingly, the survey also revealed only one instance of AI being used for cyber security; and two for market risk models.

When asked why Sweden’s financial sector has been slower to adopt AI than other countries’, Mate pointed to the fact that compliance can be a “headache”. “The financial industry is the second most regulated industry in the world, after the atomic energy,” he said. “That was the decisive answer from the respondents.”

Looking to the horizon, Mate argued that it is time for the industry to “face the monster,” and use compliance to unlock innovation and value. “If you take the transparency requirements under the AI Act, for instance, they’re not just about removing biases or bad decisions, they’re about the relevance, efficiency, and effective usage of AI as a tool.” Mate added that if businesses take steps to implement the AI Act today, their employees’ commitment to, and confidence in using, AI will be supercharged.

To this end, Mate went on to recommend company-wide AI and data literacy programms: “AI-literate teams enjoy a competitive edge, market leadership, faster innovation, stronger customer loyalty, higher acquisition success, and stronger regulatory positioning.”

The keynote presentation was closed with three key takeaways:

1. If data is the new oil, then compliance is the refinery

2. Regulations don’t hinder innovation, they structure it

3. Digital compliance shouldn’t be seen as a cost line, but a catalyst for growth

In the final words of Mate, “it is the error of any industry to say that it will not prioritise AI.”