Age of Agility: My impressions from the W@Competition Conference, Brussels
- Helen Kean Redpath
- Jun 2
- 5 min read
In March 2025, I attended the Women@Competition Conference, held in Brussels. This conference brought together over 400 attendees from around the world to discuss competition policy and practice. Soon after this conference, which came at a time when the US took some dramatic trade turns, a collaborator commented to me over lunch that discussing competition policy is like asking a friend about your weekend tennis match after they have just told you of an unfortunate personal situation. In certain moments this year, it certainly has been this way, but I am inspired to see and sense, from this conference and other forums, that competition policy and practice – well integrated with all spheres of policy and agile in every sense – is needed perhaps more so than ever, especially at this time in history, where the development of politics and AI separately and together create conditions for a perfect future storm. I distill my impressions from the conference in the following paragraphs.
Women@Competition, or simply W@Competition is a global organisation driven by members. It was founded and is chaired by Evelina Kurgonaitė, the Secretary General of the Fair Standards Alliance in Brussels. It has no employees and is entirely female driven. It is well known across most of the world and connects thousands of women working in competition and antitrust. Its aim? To see and be seen and shift subconscious heuristics, with the idea that being seen is critically important to continue to improve the gender landscape in competition practice, given the vast amount of female talent present in this space, bringing with it fresh and clear perspectives. That was certainly my impression from this conference – speakers and networkers alike brought sensible, fresh, clear, and well communicated perspectives on issues.
The theme of the conference was agility – often a buzzword in business, but highly apt to summarize a great deal of the content and space in which the world finds itself at present. Sessions focused on big picture topics such as what was in March 2025, the very imminent expectation of tariff announcements and trade negotiations from the US. This theme sparked a lot of debate amongst European speakers, who called for more multilateralism in economic policy. These speakers more specifically called for urgency in working toward a single European market, especially in sectors like telecommunications, finance, and savings. This message may be relevant for broader regions such as Africa – as we develop the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement and integrate competition processes across jurisdictions.
Another globally relevant theme that was stressed was the need for countries to avoid being left behind in the productivity leap, for which data, skills, and compute capacity is required. Even as I write, many countries are investing heavily to avoid being left behind economies like the US and China.
A third broad theme questioned whether one regulates differently if the aim is to support local competition or to develop country competitiveness. Andreas Mundt, President of the Bundeskartellamt (German Competition Authority), argued that it is all the same and most countries already have this consideration embedded in their competition laws. Discussion among a broader set of countries on this point may further the debate. Especially where countries have taken an approach to regulating certain sectors such as tech with a specific aim in mind, this may be beneficial to learn from.
The above broader themes, all of which highlighted general enthusiasm about competition policy, focused largely on Europe. Sentiment from the US, discussed by Fiona Scott Morton, was that the current US administration, save for some focus on tech sectors, tends to prioritize company profits over competition. i.e., her view was that the current administration is not very enthusiastic about competition policy. The exception continues to be clear from cases in the last few weeks such as the recent Meta case, and Google (Ad Tech and Chrome) cases.
More detailed themes focused on agility in our everyday approach to competition policy and practice. Two of the most memorable themes in my view were on agility in our everyday work as competition practitioners, and more agile communications.
On the former, I was inspired to hear about the Spanish Competition Authorities’ development of its own specialised AI model (Bid Rigging Algorithm for Vigilance in Antitrust, BRAVA). I later learnt from Cani Fernandez, President of the Spanish Competition Authority, that key to this development was their taking initiative to start collecting data to train the model many years back. This mimics what we see in the global AI trends – at first blush there may be many competition concerns about the few huge players being fed unprecedented amounts of data by us every minute of the day. What is not often appreciated is the long-term bet that many of these companies took to get to the current point. As always, small steps at the right time lead to great strides forward. I cannot comment on whether this dynamic competition race might continue or not, but the Spanish Competition Authority’s approach lends lessons for all of us finding innovative ways to approach our everyday work.
Similar discussions by many competition authorities, in-house teams, and private practitioners discussed their building of innovative teams, including engineers, historians, and ML and AI specialists.
The theme of communications was – highly appropriately – delivered with great communication by Maria Carrasco Lopez-Jurado (Counsel at Zalando) and Elisa Theresa Hauch (Counsel at Blomstein). These speakers likened communications with competition authorities as a love drama, where one is clearly not happy with another, but the remedy is not communicated, nor is there any good process to find a remedy, leaving it as an expensive and long-standing back-and-forth guessing game of what the other wants. This story was told through the eyes of the Google Shopping case, where the company was ordered to stop self-preferencing, but received little guidance from authorities on how to comply with the ruling. This highlighted the need for a balance between leaving companies to assess risks and ensuring that authorities understand what is practically achievable. Both speakers agreed that competition authorities must remain ahead of the curve in terms of technical expertise to effectively engage in these instances.
Examples of the need for better communication were also presented by contrasting how cases are communicated to the public across Europe, the UK, and the US. It was argued that it is unsurprising that in many countries, the public does not understand, nor is intended to understand, competition policy and practice, given the lack of concise and well worded case summaries.
This was certainly a worthwhile conference to attend, with frank and insightful discussions, and I look forward to attending again in future.
Image 1: Linsey McCallum, (left) | Prof. Fiona Scott Morton (right)
Image 2: (left to right) Angeline Woods | Amaryllis Müller | Maria Carrasco | Dr. Elisa Hauch | Sophie Sperlich
Images provided by writer
Helen Kean Redpath is currently Associate Director, Berkeley Research Group (BRG). An economist with 15 years experience, she offers clients her expertise with the full range of competition/ antitrust matters including mergers/acquisitions, market inquiries, cartels, abuse of dominance cases, etc. Her work to date has spanned most sectors and she has worked in different industries, small and large consultancies, independently, and with both local and global teams. In the past she has also and now occasionally helps clients with regulatory, policy, development, and similar economic matters. She has successfully testified before the South African Competition Tribunal and provided expert input.
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