BRUSSELS, Aug 1 (Reuters) - Big Tech deals to acquire

skills rather than major companies may soon come under the

regulatory scrutiny they previously avoided, the outgoing head

of the European Commission's antitrust unit said.

Acquihires, in which Big Tech hires start-ups' founders and

senior managers rather than acquire the companies, have been

viewed by antitrust regulators as an attempt to evade merger

rules.

"It is important to preserve effective competition," Olivier

Guersent, the director general at the competition unit, told

Reuters in an interview earlier this week and ahead of his

retirement on Thursday after a 33-year career tackling

antitrust, cartels and financial services.

He said the Commission was pushing national agencies with

call-in powers to act. Such powers, enjoyed by Denmark, Hungary,

Ireland, Italy, Sweden, Slovenia, Lithuania and Latvia, allow

them to refer below-EU threshold mergers to the EU enforcer.

"So we need to be patient and have enough member states that

have call-in provisions and use them. But we are working on it.

Within the ECN, we are actively encouraging it to do so,"

Guersent said. The European Competition Network is a forum for

cooperation between the Commission and national regulators.

Guersent said acquihires can be considered a merger as staff

are part of a company's assets.

Instances include Microsoft's ( MSFT ) $650 million deal to

hire most of AI start-up Inflection's staff, including its

co-founders and Google's poaching of employees from

chatbot startup Character.AI, both last year.

Last month Google hired staff members from AI code

generation startup Windsurf.

Amazon hired AI firm Adept's co-founders and some of its

team in June last year, while Meta poached data-labelling

startup Scale AI's CEO in June after taking a multi-billion

dollar stake.

Guersent, who spearheaded the EU's landmark Digital Markets

Act that aims to curb Big Tech's power, said the results were

encouraging.

"It made a difference in fields in which decades of

antitrust enforcement have not managed to make a difference," he

said.

"Did it change everything as much as we would have liked?

Probably not. So that's why success is always relative," he

said, contrasting Apple's changes to its closed ecosystem with

Meta's pushback.