Governor Fabio Panetta used the central bank’s annual assembly to pitch AI as a fix for Italy’s chronic productivity problem, and to say the bank is already engaging the firms building it.
Central bankers do not usually go out of their way to say which technology companies they are speaking to. Fabio Panetta did.
At the Bank of Italy’s annual assembly on Friday, the governor said the bank is in contact with the world’s leading developers of artificial intelligence and has recently opened talks with Italian lenders about putting the technology to work.
The remark is a small one in the text of a long address, but it signals a posture. A central bank that names its engagement with frontier AI firms is treating the technology as something it intends to understand from the inside, rather than regulate from a distance, and it lands in a country where the biggest US labs have begun planting flags.
Panetta’s larger argument was economic. Italy has a long-running productivity problem, with output per worker that has barely grown for two decades, and he framed AI as a plausible part of the answer.
