Proactive, open, platform-based and data-driven: Assessing the institutional foundations for AI in EU public administration

IMPACTThis article speaks to senior civil servants, digital government strategists and EU policy-makers who allocate AI and digital transformation funding, particularly those managing recovery and resilience facility investments and national digital government strategies. It offers a practical diagnostic tool, the AI Foundations Index (AFI), which identifies which specific institutional foundation—anticipatory capacity, open data practices, platform infrastructure, or data-driven decision-making—is weakest in a given country, rather than relying on aggregate digital rankings that can mask critical gaps. The findings show that even digitally advanced states, such as the Netherlands, may lack the institutional scaffolding needed to deploy AI responsibly. Moreover, the nearly 15-to-1 disparity in anticipatory capacity across the EU suggests that funding AI pilots before strengthening these foundations risks reproducing the institutional failures exemplified by the Dutch childcare benefits scandal. Practitioners can use the index to sequence investment so that foundation building precedes, rather than follows, AI-specific initiatives.