OpenAI’s new playbook to win over Europe

When people talk about AI in Europe, strict regulation is usually the first thing that comes to mind. OpenAI wants to change that narrative.

The AI lab just dropped its EU Economic Blueprint 2.0, revealing fresh data on how Europeans actually use ChatGPT and rolling out a major push to train tens of thousands of local businesses.

The thinking gap inside Europe

OpenAI's latest report highlights what it calls a "capability overhang"—the widening gap between what frontier AI models can handle and how people and businesses actually put them to work.

To measure this, OpenAI tracked "thinking capabilities," which measures the computational effort and depth a model uses to answer prompts rather than simple superficial queries.

Globally, a typical power user taps seven times more thinking capabilities than an average user. Among the top 70 countries with the highest ChatGPT usage, leading nations burn through three times more thinking capabilities per person than lagging ones.

The EU as a whole actually punches above its weight, using 17% more thinking depth per person than the rest of the world. But the internal split is stark: the most intensive EU member state uses 40% more thinking capacity than the least, and nine EU nations still sit below the global average.

Training 20,000 businesses and funding youth safety

The gap is especially brutal for small firms. Citing Eurostat data, OpenAI noted that only 17% of European small businesses adopted AI in 2025, compared to 55% of large enterprises.

To tackle that divide, OpenAI is teaming up with Booking.com to launch the SME AI Accelerator. The program plans to train 20,000 small and medium-sized enterprises across France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Ireland, and the UK.

The training will run through free virtual sessions on OpenAI Academy along with in-person workshops, open to teams across all industries regardless of tech background.

OpenAI is also extending an olive branch to European regulators by launching a €500,000 Youth Safety Grant Program to support independent research on child safety and digital wellbeing. On top of that, it plans to expand its OpenAI for Europe initiative in 2026 to partner with governments on education, healthcare, and cybersecurity.

Why it matters

For small business owners across Europe, this is a practical lifeline. Most small shops and service firms have zero AI engineering talent, and getting structured, free training on real-world workflows could save hours on routine operations like marketing and inventory.

Strategically, this is classic diplomatic soft power from OpenAI. Europe's regulatory stance has long been a headache for Silicon Valley, but OpenAI is positioning itself not as an invasive tech giant, but as an engine for European economic competitiveness.

We think this play is quite clever: by pairing workforce skilling with grants for youth safety and government partnerships, OpenAI is answering Brussels' top anxieties before they turn into new legal hurdles.

The catch, of course, is vendor lock-in. Training 20,000 European companies directly on OpenAI workflows effectively cements its ecosystem right in the backyard of European rivals like Mistral.