StateUp Convenes Distinguished Leaders in Copenhagen for Critical Conversations on AI, Resilience, and Geopolitics

With warfare becoming increasingly asymmetrical, climate concerns requiring unprecedented industrial shifts, and emerging technologies challenging the world order, European leaders are waking up to the critical importance of shoring up our ability to withstand digital shocks. 

If the imperative for digital resilience has never been more clear, the path to securing it is perhaps more complex than ever. Overlapping crises, competing priorities and uncertainty all complicate states’ ability to anticipate challenges, navigate complexity and remain agile. 

To generate ways forward, StateUp convened a high-level, curated track at Beyond GovTech in Copenhagen, Denmark, focused on Digital Resilience in an Age of Geopolitical Shifts. Co-hosted with Digital Hub Denmark, the conversations featured distinguished leaders from across Europe, including senior policymakers, diplomats, technology changemakers and other key practitioners at the forefront of these efforts. 

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TECH DIPLOMACY AND DEFENCE INNOVATION

Defence concerns, energy security and emerging technology are top of mind for European leaders, but these issues are too often treated as discrete policy challenges and tackled in silos, warned StateUp CEO Dr. Tanya Filer in her opening remarks. “It is now very important that we think about the intersections of technology and AI, of energy changes and energy security, and geopolitics in concert,” she said. Resilience in an era of technological, defence, and energy transitions requires proactive, cross-cutting strategic decisionmaking. 

INTRODUCING THE ‘TRIPLE TRANSITION’

StateUp has officially launched a timely new brief, "The Triple Transition: Navigating the New Geopolitics of Technology, Defence, and Energy." The “Triple Transition” argues that resilience requires addressing three intersecting imperatives – Advanced Digital Technologies, Defence and Security Innovation, and Low-Carbon Energy Systems – in a coordinated way, using key policy, technology, investment, and procurement levers

Read the full report

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European leaders, for whom these issues could not be more pressing, agreed. H.E. Andre Pung, Estonian Ambassador to Denmark, noted that “the perception of threat in different parts of Europe has been very different” in relation to security and defence, as recent survey results support. Differences in proximity to physical conflict mean that unified action across the Union may not be “moving as quick as we would like,” H.E. Pung noted” 

Melanie Garson, Associate Professor at University College London, noted that structural causes contribute to the slow pace. She noted that interministerial competition for resources can stifle cooperation and hinder innovation.tackling defence, technology and energy in concert may require “a massive restructuring of how we fundamentally do government”. 
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ENABLING RESILIENCE THROUGH DIGITAL GOVERNMENT, REGULATION, AND COMMUNICATIONS

A second panel, moderated by Tamara Beresh, Head of Communications for the Global Government Technology Centre in Kyiv, focused on the roles of digital regulation, services and innovation in fostering resilient systems. For Nicoleta Colomeet, Director of the Moldovan e-Governance Agency (MEGA), “resilience is about how we ensure availability of our systems so that trust is not eroded.” 

Theo Blackwell MBE, Chief Digital Officer for London, emphasised that regulation must strike the right balance between innovating around emerging technologies and maintaining important democratic guardrails. “Transparency around how we use emerging technologies and the reverberations with AI and how [citizens will be] impacted” is key, he noted. 

Steve Unger, Former Board member and Acting Chief Executive of Ofcom, cautioned that getting regulation right is a difficult task, and one that requires the appropriate expertise: “When you get to do something quite complicated like a communications network, you need to make sure it is carried out by people that understand it,” he said. As history contends, that regulatory balancing act requires “[Looking] at the real risks and where you can afford to let the market try … [we need to] address areas of real risk and harm, but do that in a targeted way.”

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CRITICAL TECHNOLOGIES AND STRATEGIC SECTORS AMID GLOBAL TRANSITIONS

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With defence a key European priority, critical technologies have an increasingly important role to play. The track’s final panel, moderated by the Head of the Scottish Government’s Nordic Office Katrine Feldinger, drilled down on this exigency. Lukas Savickas, MP and former Minister of the Economy and Innovation of Lithuania made clear that for the Baltic States. “Technological dependence is moving into an issue of national security…ith energy, data supply chains becoming weaponised … this is an area where we have to move very quick, accept those realities and make good decisions.” 

Juan Farré, CEO of the Danish Technological Institute, added that cross-border collaboration and interoperability is central to these efforts. “Without synchronised frequencies, delivery of services, of innovation, and recognition of our challenges and how to learn from each other, we cannot advance,” he cautioned. In this sense, European cooperation for the triple transition is important both because European countries face similar challenges and can learn from one another but also because European vulnerabilities require a joined-up approach cutting across national industries and priorities, in order to reach the scale, talent and capital needed to build and grow European industrial and tech leaders 

Industries across Europe are beginning to make significant strides in developing secure dual-use digital tools. Panelist Mark Medum Bundgaard, Chief Product Officer for Partisia, a global pioneer in Multiparty Computation (MPC) and advanced cryptographic enforced privacy and a developer of quantum-proof platforms, said that the paths towards data sovereignty and data sharing are intertwined and that both require more and better information flows across sectors, to ultimately support larger cross-cutting strategic aims.  

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