Digital transition: shaping the EU's digital future
The digital transition is crucial for the EU's economic growth and strategic autonomy. The EU wants to ensure that Europe fully seizes the opportunities offered by the digital decade.
Digitalisation: opportunities and risks
Digital technologies are transforming people's lives - from the way we communicate to how we live and work.
Digitalisation has the potential to provide solutions to many of the challenges Europe and Europeans are facing and offers opportunities such as:
- creating jobs
- advancing education
- boosting competitiveness and innovation
- fighting climate change and enabling a green transition
Digitalisation plays an essential role for society, prosperity, and innovation. Digital technologies, however, do not only open up benefits and opportunities, but also create new challenges and risks. The COVID-19 crisis, for example, highlighted persistent digital divides in Europe – not only between well-connected areas and remote territories, but also between the people and businesses that can fully benefit from the digital space and those that cannot.
To make our societies and economies fit for the digital age, the EU is committed to creating a safe digital space for citizens and businesses in a manner that is inclusive and accessible for all. This means enabling a digital transformation that safeguards EU values and protects citizens’ fundamental rights and security, while also enhancing Europe’s digital sovereignty.
To this end, the EU needs to:
- tackle issues hindering the digital transformation (such as lack of skills, lack of infrastructures and slow digitalisation of public and private sectors)
- reduce its dependence on other regions for key digital capacities
- increase investment in digital technologies
- promote convergence among member states
- create synergies between the green and digital transitions
Digital decade programme
The 'path to the digital decade' is the EU policy programme for the digital transformation. The programme is structured around four areas:
- digital skills
- digital transformation of businesses
- secure and sustainable digital infrastructures
- digitalisation of public services
The digital decade policy programme sets specific digital targets and milestones to be reached by 2030. To achieve these objectives, it includes an annual cooperation cycle involving the European Commission and member states, as well as a monitoring mechanism.
The programme heavily relies on large-scale projects which allow member states to pool resources and work together closely to build digital capacities they could not develop on their own.
These multi-country projects facilitate investments in areas such as:
- common data infrastructure
- deployment of 5G corridors
- high-performance computing
- blockchain services infrastructure
- digital public administration
- high-tech partnerships for digital skills
Adoption of the digital decade policy programme
In March 2021, the Commission presented a communication on the ‘digital compass’, which sets out a vision and targets for fostering digitalisation in the EU by 2030. It describes the EU’s ambition to be digitally sovereign in an open and interconnected world, and to pursue digital policies that allow people and businesses to have a human-centred, inclusive, sustainable, and prosperous digital future.
The Compass includes a proposal for a decision of the European Parliament and the Council to establish an EU policy programme which sets out the governance framework forreaching the 2030 digital objectives.
On 25 March 2021, EU leaders stressed the need to enhance the EU’s digital sovereignty in an autonomous and open manner and invited the Council to swiftly examine the digital compass with a view to preparing the envisaged digital policy programme. They also called on the Commission to identify further systems of critical technologies and additional strategic sectors, and to widen the EU’s toolbox for digital transformation.
In response, the Commission proposed the digital policy programme 'Path to the Digital Decade' in September 2021. The Council adopted the programme on 8 December 2022.
See also
'Path to the Digital Decade': the EU's plan to achieve a digital Europe by 2030
The EU chips industry
EU plans to boost AI with supercomputers
Last review: 11 November 2025