Mr. Ivailo Kalfin:

We do research on productivity and we currently have a major project on AI and productivity, including AI at work and productivity and how this works. It is based on the case studies. We are asking companies across Europe with that experience. Normally, we address productivity from the point of view of the labour supply. I mean the labour as a production factor. What we see is very interesting. By the way, recently, we published a report that found that in the past 30 years there are 30 million more jobs in Europe, so the job creation is very high. At the same time, there are 10 million fewer people of working age because of the demographic factors. That gap of 40 million is practically filled currently with more women working, with a higher working age and people retiring later, as well as migrants to some extent or part-time work or something like that. The other thing we see is that two thirds of the European economy is already services. This is a growing trend. Last year, in the automotive sector, there were massive lay-offs of staff. Here is the problem. Because the European services sector makes up two thirds of the economy, the increase in productivity is twice as low as in the US services sector. I would look at the industry sector and the services sector separately. This has to do with working conditions and the quality of work in order to make the work attractive. Again, it is not always, and I would say very often is not, related to the pay. Of course the pay has to be decent, but then there are other factors to attract people. The other is going outside of our area. People will say that, for example, in financial services or commercial services you would see much more regulations that make it difficult for small companies to work on that, but this is something which is not exactly in our research. We look at the labour and the motivation of people to work efficiently on the job.