Europe's CEOs Push to Turn Energy Costs Into a Competitive Edge
At the Fortune CEO Forum in London, executives from Mastercard, Shell, Google, OpenAI and others argued that Europe can convert its decarbonization push into an economic advantage, even as high energy prices squeeze competitiveness.
Europe's top executives gathered in London this week with a shared diagnosis: the continent has the scale, the talent and the industrial depth to compete globally, but it needs a policy and investment environment that lets those strengths translate into growth. The occasion was the Fortune CEO Forum, held at the historic Barber-Surgeons' Hall, where leaders from Mastercard, Ferrari, BlackRock, Shell, EDF, Google, OpenAI, Honeywell, Anthropic and Microsoft met to debate the forces reshaping Europe's economy.
The backdrop was a perfect storm of mounting energy pressures, geopolitical uncertainty, slowing productivity and the rapid advance of artificial intelligence. Executives described a moment of extraordinary volatility, citing war in the Gulf, uncertainty in U.S. politics and intensifying competition from China. London, they noted, offers a useful vantage point because the U.K. remains deeply connected to European business and finance while also maintaining close links to the U.S. and the wider global economy.
A new snapshot of Europe's corporate heft underscored the stakes. The Fortune 500 Europe list, released the same day, showed the 500 largest companies generated $15.5 trillion in revenue this year, up 4% from a year earlier, and more than $1 trillion in profits. That combined revenue is equivalent to half of Europe's GDP. Finance, energy and automakers together account for more than half of all revenues and profits on the list. The ranking is a reminder, organizers said, that Europe has enormous companies, deep pools of talent, significant financial resources and areas of genuine industrial strength.
Yet business leaders from across the region called for a policy, energy, infrastructure and investment environment that allows those strengths to produce the next phase of growth. The sustainability conversation was notably clear-eyed. CEOs were not debating whether decarbonization matters; the hard part is pursuing it while energy costs squeeze competitiveness. Several leaders argued the opportunity is to turn the green transition into an advantage rather than a burden.
Some companies are already finding ways to do that. German engineering company GEA Group is baking energy efficiency into its business model, CEO Stefan Klebert said ahead of the Forum. The company redesigned machinery for a large dairy producer, cutting the energy consumption of its milk powder production by more than 50%. That kind of efficiency gain, executives suggested, is the practical path to reconciling climate goals with the cost pressures that have made European industry anxious about losing ground to rivals in the U.S. and Asia.
Artificial intelligence dominated another strand of the discussion. The timing was pointed: the Forum brought together business leaders and executives from AI labs in the same week that concerns about increasingly autonomous systems, accountability when AI acts without human sign-off, and the future of jobs were again in the headlines. The dominant mood, however, was pragmatic rather than panicked. Executives focused on how to actually use the tools, what return they deliver and how companies should govern them.
There was a strong appetite for regulation, but regulation that enables innovation rather than prevents it. That stance reflects a broader debate over how to oversee frontier AI without ceding ground to competitors. Recent months have seen AI agents found hacking into other companies' databases and seeking to deceive real individuals, while researchers used AI to create new viruses for the first time. AI industry whistleblowers have warned that companies are gambling with lives as they rush toward self-improving models, and Anthropic revealed it blocked users who could have been seeking to design biological weapons.
Those developments have sharpened the argument that AI risks do not halt at any border and that no country can hold the line alone. But the executives in London were less focused on existential warnings than on the immediate question of governance: who is responsible when AI acts without human sign-off, and how companies can adopt the technology responsibly while keeping pace with global rivals. The consensus that emerged was that Europe's challenge is not a lack of ambition or capability, but the need for coherent policy, affordable energy and infrastructure that let its largest companies convert scale into sustained growth.
