Does Regulation Slow AI Down — Or Speed It Up?

Supervised by Alberto Asquer, Head of the School of Finance & Management, the dissertation sits inside a live policy debate: governments and companies are racing to regulate AI while simultaneously racing to build it, and the conventional wisdom — that more governance means slower innovation — is largely assumed rather than tested. I set out to examine that assumption directly, looking at how different governance approaches actually correlate with the pace organisations move at.
The methodology centres on interviews — speaking directly with people inside organisations navigating the EU AI Act, rather than relying purely on secondary policy analysis. The EU AI Act is the natural focus case: it's the most comprehensive AI-specific regulatory framework currently in force, and its risk-based, tiered compliance structure gives a real test case for whether governance clarity accelerates decision-making or just adds friction. Interviewing people actually operating under it — rather than theorising from the text of the regulation alone — is what should surface whether "slower but more confident" or "genuinely slower, full stop" is the more accurate story.