Joining him will be Hemant Taneja, the Indian-American investor and author who leads General Catalyst, one of the world's largest venture-capital firms, with tens of billions of dollars under management.
Taneja has built a reputation as an early investor in some of the technology industry's best-known companies, including Stripe, Snap, Grammarly, Gusto, GitLab, Anduril and Anthropic. His conversation with Mitsotakis is likely to draw particular attention in Greece because of his previous endorsement of the country's ambitions in artificial intelligence.
During a visit to the Greek prime minister's office last year, Taneja described Greece as an interesting example of how a relatively small country could approach AI with ambition and a clear strategic direction. He singled out a national strategy developed under the leadership of Constantinos Daskalakis, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at Mitsotakis's request.
At the time, Taneja highlighted several elements of the plan, including the creation of an international institute for AI research and education, workforce retraining, efforts to improve AI literacy, investment in infrastructure and the broader innovation ecosystem, and the use of data and artificial intelligence to help preserve the Greek language and cultural heritage.
A year later, however, the more consequential question is how much of that agenda has moved from planning to execution—and with what results. How many of the initiatives announced as part of Greece's AI strategy are now operational? More important, are there clearly defined key performance indicators and measurable outcomes showing that the country has made substantive progress?
Those questions matter beyond Greece. Taneja has recently argued that Europe faces structural challenges that the traditional venture-capital model alone isn't equipped to solve. His prescription is a different approach, one that brings technology, public policy and private investment into closer alignment.
Central to that argument is deeper cooperation between governments and the private sector, as well as greater support for startups at the earliest stages of development, particularly in strategically important sectors such as defense, healthcare and artificial intelligence.
For Europe, in Taneja's view, the objective shouldn't simply be to produce more world-class startups. It should be to build a resilient innovation ecosystem while accelerating the adoption of new technologies across the broader economy. That would require forging closer links between startups and Europe's established industrial companies, allowing AI applications to move beyond laboratories and early-stage ventures and into large-scale commercial deployment.
