National Economy Minister Márton Nagy said the role of Artificial Intelligence in the economy will grow in importance.
Minister Nagy warned that at the same time technology protectionism and trade wars were holding back technological developments, the US and China were taking center stage while “the EU is steadily falling apart”. Nagy said Europe trailed China and the AI developments which would be one of the main motors of the economy. He said Hungary was open and pragmatic when it came to global challenges but kept the national interest in mind too. Hungarian digital infrastructure, he added, was a good basis for the country’s technological transformation, though challenges lay ahead in areas such as digital skills and digitalisation of businesses, these being requisites for the convergence of labour productivity towards the EU average. So the importance of AI for Hungarian businesses “will grow significantly”, he argued. Minister Nagy said his ministry was creating the right regulatory environment for the country’s technological transformation and the government cooperated with the largest telecommunications providers to further digitalisation, especially in the food, vehicle and raw materials industries. The government wants the domestic information and communication technology sector’s contribution to GDP to grow two-fold by 2030 and for Industry 4.0 solutions to account for 50% of company investments, he said. Also, joining the space industry supply chain would help domestic tech companies break out, as the value of the global space industry is estimated to rise from 630 billion US dollars to 1.8 trillion by 2035, providing nearly 230,000 jobs across Europe. Hungary has been a member of the European Space Agency (ESA) since 2015, and the country’s first space strategy was adopted in 2021, he noted. Preparations for the implementation of the European AI Act will begin under the Hungarian EU presidency, he added.