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.
Under slow adoption, he said, the technology might lift Italian productivity by 0.2 percentage points a year.
Under rapid, broad uptake, it could add more than a full point a year, a difference that compounds into very different futures for an economy that has struggled to grow.
The gap between those two scenarios is, in effect, an adoption problem, and the current numbers explain his concern. Around 30% of Italian firms use AI in some form, Panetta said, but only about 5% use it intensively.
A technology can be widely sampled and barely deployed at the same time, and Italy sits squarely in that gap, which is why the difference between dabbling and committing matters so much to the figures.
To close it, Panetta pointed to capital rather than code. Italy needs deeper venture-capital and private-equity industries, he argued, the financing layers that let domestic AI companies scale rather than sell early or move abroad.
It is a recurring European complaint: the continent produces research and founders but has historically lacked the growth capital that turns them into large companies at home.
The timing sharpens the point. Anthropic opened a Milan office this week, naming Italian enterprise customers from Generali to Enel, and the major US labs are courting Italian institutions directly.
A central bank saying it is in the room with those firms, and nudging banks toward adoption, reads as Rome trying to shape how the technology arrives rather than simply receiving it.
None of what Panetta described is a binding commitment, and an annual address is a place for direction more than detail. The substance worth watching is whether the talks with banks turn into deployments, and whether the venture-capital push he called for actually materialises.
For now, the governor has said the quiet part aloud: Italy’s central bank is engaging the AI industry, and it would like the country to move faster.
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