Jacques Bughin, a director at the McKinsey Global Institute, explains the three elements necessary to scale up artificial intelligence and where Europe stands.

"We need infastructure, we need a platform and we need data," Bughin says of AI strategy. "We have so many countries starting to say "'I want to do AI.'"

MGI’s 2016 research found that European countries were capturing only 12 percent of their full digital potential (defined as weighted deployment of digital assets, labor, and practices across all sectors, compared with the most digitized sector)—two-thirds of the captured potential in the United States.