The European Commission has appointed Jim Hagemann Snabe, chairman of Siemens’ supervisory board, as its special envoy for industrial artificial intelligence. He will advise Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and tech sovereignty chief Henna Virkkunen on how to accelerate AI adoption across European industry.

The backlash was immediate. Snabe’s appointment lands weeks after Siemens was among the companies that lobbied hardest for the rollback of the EU’s AI Act, the world’s most ambitious AI regulatory framework. Critics say the appointment amounts to handing advisory power over AI policy to the same industry that successfully weakened it.

Who is Jim Hagemann Snabe

Snabe, 60, is a Danish executive who co-led SAP as co-CEO from 2010 to 2014 before moving to the supervisory board. He became chairman of Siemens’ supervisory board in 2018. Beyond those roles, he has served on the advisory board of Google Cloud, on the board of US enterprise AI firm C3.ai, and as a board of trustees member at the World Economic Forum.

The Commission says it conducted a thorough conflict-of-interest assessment before the appointment. For the duration of his mandate, which runs until 31 March 2027, Snabe will suspend his Google Cloud and C3.ai memberships. The role is unpaid.

The AI Act rollback

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The timing is what makes the appointment politically charged. On 7 May, the Council of the EU and the European Parliament reached a deal to simplify the AI Act through the so-called Digital Omnibus. The headline change was a 16-month delay to high-risk AI obligations, pushing the deadline from August 2026 to December 2027.

More significantly for Siemens, the deal introduced an industrial AI exemption. AI systems used on factory floors and embedded in machinery will now be covered by separate machinery regulations rather than the AI Act, unless a failure could directly endanger health or safety. Germany, where Siemens is headquartered, led the push for that exemption. Chancellor Friedrich Merz called for freeing industrial AI from the EU’s “regulatory straightjacket” at the Hannover Messe trade fair in April, with Siemens executives alongside him.

Virkkunen, who drove the simplification through the College of Commissioners, framed the deal as proof that Europe can maintain a rules-based approach while making regulation workable for industry. Snabe’s appointment is the next step in that direction: an explicit signal that industrial competitiveness, not regulatory caution, is now the priority.

The criticism

“My first reaction was just: Wow,” said Kim van Sparrentak, the Dutch Green lawmaker who led the Parliament’s work on the AI Act. “They fought hard against AI rules for themselves, they lobby against technological sovereignty, and now they get to decide how we are going to integrate AI.”

The concern is not only about Siemens. Snabe’s board positions at Google Cloud and C3.ai place him at the intersection of the three constituencies most directly affected by EU AI policy: European industry, US Big Tech, and the enterprise AI software market. Suspending board seats is not the same as severing ties, and critics argue that an unpaid advisory role with no formal accountability is precisely the kind of arrangement that makes revolving-door governance difficult to scrutinise.

The Commission has not disclosed the specific terms of Snabe’s conflict-of-interest assessment. It says one was carried out but has not published the methodology or findings, which makes the assurance hard to evaluate independently.

What the role involves

Snabe’s mandate is to advise on how Europe can boost industrial AI adoption, a priority that the Commission has elevated since the AI Act’s passage exposed a tension at the heart of European tech policy: the desire to regulate AI and the fear of falling behind the US and China in deploying it.

The appointment was announced alongside the Commission’s broader technology sovereignty blueprint, which includes the Cloud and AI Development Act, Chips Act 2.0, and new restrictions on US cloud providers handling sensitive European government data. Snabe’s role sits within that framework, theoretically bridging the gap between Brussels’ regulatory ambitions and the corporate reality of getting AI into European factories.

Whether a Siemens chairman is the right person to bridge that gap or simply the most obvious symptom of the gap itself is the question Brussels will be debating for the duration of his mandate.