Why Europe can lead in trusted, industrialized AI

As we enter the agentic era, moving from AI that talks to AI that acts, trust has never been more critical. Europe’s mature economies, leading companies, and regulatory rigor, give it an opportunity to pioneer trusted enterprise AI on an industrial scale—ahead of its rivals.

This is not an unreasonable ambition. The real economic potential of AI lies in proprietary data, unique to one enterprise or industry, but AI models are only using about 1% of it. Imagine the global competitive advantage that could be unlocked by major European industries if they infused their rich, sovereign data into AI models, applications, and processes.

European organizations are now focused on accelerating returns on AI investments while preparing for EU AI Act compliance. Three strategic levers will help fast-track their journey.

Shifting gears: From productivity to decision velocity

Too many C-suite leaders still measure AI by seconds saved per email, a metric with negligible impact on the P&L. The reality is that, very soon, ROI will no longer be driven by incremental productivity, but by ‘decision velocity’: deploying autonomous agents that don’t just process information but use every interaction to refine their understanding of what works and what’s next.

Many European business leaders already have this mindset. IBM’s The Enterprise in 2030 report reveals 55% of executives believe competitive advantage will depend more on speed than perfection in the next few years. In telecoms, which AI is transforming, this jumps to 64%. As the industry gathers at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, leaders will be asking what moving faster looks like.

Read more: How AI can power Europe’s next industrial revolution by Dave McCann

Increasingly, it requires techniques such as ‘strategic simulation’. By pairing digital twins with AI agents, for example, telcos can run what-if scenarios on new services or simulate customer experiences pre-launch. And when AI sales agents detect shifting patterns, they can trigger real-time upsells, turning data into revenue. The same is true in banking, retail, entertainment, and any customer-centric industry.

To build decision velocity and harness agentic AI, Europe needs smart enterprises that can respond dynamically to market changes. An important first step is to pivot from AI assistants that simply summarize a contract, for example, to agents that can identify a breach, calculate financial risk, and draft a mitigation plan for human approval.

Turning compliance into advantage

New risks from more autonomous AI agents are, rightly, attracting the attention of regulators. In the EU, regulation is often bemoaned as a bureaucratic brake. But, on the flipside, it offers an opportunity for European firms to lead in risk-managed AI innovation, delivering AI people can trust.

As the EU’s Digital Omnibus on AI moves through parliament, organizations are preparing higher-risk systems in areas like HR, banking and critical infrastructure for compliance with the EU AI Act. A key component is explainability—demanding transparent, interpretable insights into how AI outputs are generated. This is fundamental for trustworthy AI adoption in critical sectors. Done right, building in transparency makes AI better and more reliable.

By solving for trust early on, Europe has the potential to evolve from a regulator of technology into the world’s premier laboratory for industrialized AI—a sandbox on an unprecedented scale.

The power of sovereign AI

Digital sovereignty is about more than compliance; it can be a powerful competitive differentiator. In a survey we conducted in late 2025, 85% of European executives cited interoperability, choice, and transparency of AI systems as critical priorities. The perception, however, is that these requirements might slow their AI adoption and innovation, widening the gap between EU businesses and their nimbler rivals.

A key part of the solution is architectural, or ‘sovereignty as code’. Thanks to software innovation, control and speed are no longer mutually exclusive. Innovations such as IBM Sovereign Core, for example, allow organizations to maintain full control over their data and AI environments while complying with local laws by baking sovereignty into the software architecture itself.

European leaders are also wary of ‘data gravity’—the risk of their secret sauce being sucked into global black-box models. The answer? Small, domain-specific AI models. Rather than relying on one generic all-knowing giant, European enterprises can win by training smaller, customized models on their own rich data sets, from German medical devices to French luxury goods. They are cheaper to run, more accurate, and keep intellectual property within European borders—a performance advantage that no one-size-fits-all engine can match.

The European Playbook: Winning the long game

As AI agents become more autonomous, organizations need trust as well as speed. This is where Europe’s structural advantages can really shine. Instead of racing to deploy AI at any cost, European enterprises can build something more valuable: systems upon which businesses can actually rely at scale. Transparent models, sovereign data architectures, and compliance-ready tech are the foundation of competitive advantage in regulated industries worth trillions. By pioneering the industrialization of trusted enterprise AI, Europe can establish technical and ethical standards the world can follow. This is the opportunity to define what responsible, high-performance AI looks like when the stakes are highest.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.