I love Europe.
I should probably establish that before proceeding.
But I have just spent roughly four hours of my life queuing at Geneva Airport, which gives a man plenty of time to contemplate European technology policy, his own mortality, and whether it would be quicker simply to walk back to England.
The cause was EES, Europe’s shiny new Entry/Exit System.
The idea is perfectly reasonable.
Europe would like to know:
Who entered?
When did they enter?
When did they leave?
Did they overstay?
And are they actually the person they claim to be?
These are sensible questions.
They are also questions that computers should be extraordinarily good at answering.
My passport contains a chip. EES already has my photograph and biometrics. Facial recognition can establish that I am me. A database can establish when I last entered Europe. Another tiny bit of mathematics can establish whether I’ve spent more than 90 days there.
This feels like a job that should take approximately three seconds.
Instead, at Geneva, it involves machines, kiosks, passports, biometrics, border officials and an enormous queue of increasingly elderly-looking British people.
And standing in that queue, I realised EES is a wonderful example of a much bigger problem with technology.
We keep digitising bureaucracy instead of removing it.
The old process exists.
A giant organisation decides to modernise it.
Committees are formed. Requirements are gathered. Every country needs to be supported. Every edge case needs to be considered. A vast central system is commissioned.
Years pass.
Eventually the new technology arrives.
And somehow the old process is still there.
Except now you have to use the new system as well.
This is almost the exact opposite of how the best technology gets built today.
Small teams ship something. They watch people use it. They discover what’s stupid. They fix the stupid thing. They ship again.
The question isn’t:
How do we digitise border control?
It’s:
Why does this person need to stop at all?
For the overwhelming majority of returning travellers with biometric passports, the ideal border experience should be simple:
Look at camera.
Computer says yes.
Walk through.
If something looks wrong, then involve a human.
Instead we’ve built an extraordinarily sophisticated system capable of recognising my face, reading the cryptographically secured chip in my passport, searching enormous databases and calculating my immigration status…
…so that I can join a queue and show my passport to Franz.
This would just be an amusing airport story if it didn’t feel like a tiny version of a much bigger European problem.
In 2024, Mario Draghi published his report on the future of European competitiveness. His diagnosis was uncomfortable: Europe is falling behind the US and China in innovation, European companies struggle to scale, regulation is fragmented, and bureaucracy makes it harder to move quickly.
The report is worth reading.
And after four hours at Geneva Airport, I couldn’t help thinking that EES is a rather wonderful physical demonstration of the problem.
Europe doesn’t lack clever people.
It doesn’t lack technology.
It doesn’t lack money.
What it sometimes seems to lack is the ability to make complicated things simpler.
Because real digital transformation isn’t adding technology to a process.
It’s having the confidence to remove the process that the technology made unnecessary.
Perhaps Europe’s technology problem isn’t ultimately about AI models, venture capital or supercomputers.
Perhaps it’s something much more basic.
How comfortable are we with deleting things?
Because if every new solution requires another central system, another layer of rules, another process and another queue, technology doesn’t make the bureaucracy disappear.
It just gives Franz a nicer computer.
And me four hours to think about it.
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