President Macron shook up Davos a simple message: Paris wants to be a serious place for European AI, and the way to get there is to build the kind of platform that makes ecosystems work together. That message took shape with the inauguration of the Center for AI Excellence (CAIE), launched through the World Economic Forum and VivaTech partnership, and positioned to tailor solutions to Europe’s AI needs while driving innovation and growth. As Frenchtechjournal.com quoted Macron during the Davos moment: “This center, for me, will be an accelerator for all our initiatives and for what we are doing, by teaming up with the best experts in the world, by challenging our approaches, by making sure that we are at the right pace, at the right scale.”
CAIE is a centre the World Economic Forum and VivaTech agreed to launch in Paris, designed to tackle key AI challenges by tailoring solutions to Europe’s needs. Its strategic priorities include showcasing research and breakthroughs, driving responsible adoption across industries, fostering cross-sector collaboration, and connecting Europe’s AI innovation ecosystem with global opportunities. Paris is central because the initiative explicitly builds on France as a key global AI player and links back to the Action AI Summit organized by President Emmanuel Macron in February 2025 in Paris.
CAIE is also designed to join the World Economic Forum’s Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) global network. In the WEF’s framing, C4IR is a platform for multi-stakeholder collaboration bringing together public and private sectors to maximize technological benefits while minimizing risks, supported by a global network of independent national and thematic centers. Put simply, CAIE is meant to be Europe’s node in that operating network, with access to global connections, methods, and convening power that can help turn momentum into something repeatable at scale.
Maurice Lévy (VivaTech) is Chairman of CAIE, PwC is a founding partner, and our global chairman Mohamed Kande is President of the Partner Board. Jeremy Jurgens, Managing Director at the World Economic Forum, is one of the senior WEF leaders publicly associated with the launch. You can feel the intent to set governance early and build a coalition that keeps moving after Davos.
From where I sit, this matters because Europe’s AI challenge is a scaling problem. The friction sits between research, startups, large companies, and public institutions, especially once you cross borders. CAIE is framed around adoption, collaboration, and connecting the European ecosystem to global opportunities, which is exactly where things tend to slow down in real life. And yes, there is a very CIO-shaped reason to care. In my world, AI is now part of the keep-the-plates-spinning problem: it consumes compute, attention, skills, and governance bandwidth, and it forces choices about data readiness and operating model all at once. A center that helps Europe converge on practical ways to deploy trusted AI, while strengthening the ecosystem of partners and champions, can make those choices easier to make and easier to defend internally.
PwC being a founding partner puts responsibility on us too. Maurice Lévy captured the ambition clearly: “the centre will play a critical role in fostering pan-European collaboration for AI and showcasing Europe’s unique role in advocating an alternative model that balances innovation and individual rights”.
That is the part I like: fewer slogans, more delivery, more shared momentum, and a European ambition that comes with an execution plan.
