Marketplace Tech

Europe may have weeks of paid vacation, quaint walkable cities and incredible, affordable local wines. But there's something the continent lacks (besides ice cubes and AC): shiny, new Big Tech products.

Take Apple's revamped Siri, Meta's Muse or OpenAI's competing AI assistant dots. They've all launched in the U.S., and in some cases other markets. But largely, not in the EU, which has a network of tech regulations targeting data protection, interoperability and AI.

Max von Thun, director of the antitrust think tank Open Markets Institute Europe, explains more on this.

More on this:

“A Continent Without A.I. Agents: Europe Has to Wait for Dots, Muse and Siri AI” — from Trending Topics EU

“Europe’s AI Blues: US Companies Slow Deployment” — from Center for European Policy Analysis

New AI features are quickly rolling out in the apps we use every day — from Google’s AI-generated search summaries to Meta’s Muse agent.

But there's a big gap between what these tools can do and what most consumers find useful. The vast majority use free versions of chatbots, for searching the web, not running swarms of agents to manage their lives.

Kate Moran, a user experience researcher at Gibbons and Moran, joins us to unpack the AI adoption gap.

More on this

The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps from Andreessen Horowitz

Not quite mAInstream: A consumer AI profile from Bank of America

Americans and AI 2026: Chatbots, Smart Devices and Views on Impact from Pew Research Center

An increasing number of schools are offering classes and even majors and minors in the art of influencing.

Charlie Randall is a senior pursuing a double major in theater and content creation at Arkansas Tech University, which launched their digital content creation degree about three years ago.

He hopes to use the degrees to break into voice acting.

There's a growing market for AI models that promise to recreate the experience of interacting with a lost loved one. They're sometimes called generative ghosts, and they're the topic for today's “Uncanny AI,” our series about sometimes-unsettling experiences with this technology.

Jack Manning, a Ph.D. candidate studying information science at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been looking into this. He recently published a study on how people experience talking to generative ghosts.

More on this:

“Designing Conversations with the Dead: How People Engage with Generative Ghosts” from Association for Computing Machinery

“When AI is used to immortalize the dead, what are the ethical implications?” from Marketplace Tech

President Donald Trump named a new superhero-sounding AI task force this week dubbed the “Super Intelligence Force.” It's led by Jay Clayton, the new AI Czar and also director of national intelligence.

Plus, Democrats in the Senate blocked a bill to address data center energy costs ahead of the midterm elections, and a new poll shows Americans are not feeling too great about how our leaders in government are dealing with the risks from AI. Cristiano Lima-Strong, senior AI and government reporter at Bloomberg Government, joins Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to break down these stories on this week’s “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”