Sovereign Identity Infrastructure: Europe Unplugged

Over the past year, Europe has made significant strides toward digital sovereignty, both politically and technologically. This talk examines the key developments in Identity & Access Management (IAM), from regulatory milestones like eIDAS 2 and NIS2 to innovations in privacy-by-design architectures and federated cloud models. Participants will learn why European IAM solutions are increasingly trustworthy, how organizations can leverage them, and how IAM leaders can turn digital sovereignty into a strategic advantage that balances innovation, compliance, and security.

Europe has spent the last decade defining rules for the digital age; the next decade must be about building capability. As AI systems increasingly shape identity, administration, markets, and public decision-making, sovereignty can no longer be an afterthought—it must be designed into architectures, infrastructures, and governance models from the outset. This panel brings together academic insight, entrepreneurial practice, and ecosystem perspectives to explore how Europe can move from regulatory leadership to operational AI agency. We argue that digital identity, cloud, and AI form a single strategic system—and that Europe is still well positioned to shape it. The discussion focuses on concrete pathways to build a European future with sovereign, competitive, and globally relevant AI capacity.

Some of the discussion points

• From regulation to construction: what European AI agency actually requires
• Building sovereign AI without sacrificing openness, innovation, or global cooperation
• Beyond consumer-scale models: Why Europe’s comparative advantage in AI is likely to emerge in physical AI and industrial-grade systems rooted in manufacturing, robotics, and embedded intelligence.