Agenda

CEE does not lack breakthrough technology. It lacks the ecosystem to scale it. Across the region, founders and researchers are building globally competitive technology – and then hitting walls on growth capital, procurement and regulation. Too often, promising startups sell early, talent disperses, and innovations born here get scaled elsewhere, or not at all. The pattern is consistent – venture funding dries up at growth stage, public procurement favours incumbents, and local innovation struggles to find demand.

This panel explores how to close the scale-up gap by building stronger funding pipelines, creating demand for local innovation, and enabling CEE’s most ambitious founders to grow global companies from the region – from startup to unicorn and beyond.

AI innovation depends on access to powerful, secure, and affordable computing. ​​As demand for computing capacity accelerates, the question for the CEE region is whether to build its own sovereign AI infrastructure at scale – including data centres and AI Gigafactories supported by resilient and affordable energy systems – or to rely on infrastructure hosted elsewhere. 

This session explores how can the CEE ensure that startups, researchers, and public institutions have affordable and secure access to the computing power they need, while balancing cost, sovereignty, and scalability? Who funds it? Who governs it? And can CEE move fast enough?

One decade, two vantage points. The Europe 2031 scenario, grounded in real events through mid-2026 and extrapolated forward, traces how hesitation on compute, capital and industrial policy leaves Europe a consumer of technology it neither owns nor controls. Benjamin Tallis brings the view from inside Helsing – founded in 2021, valued at $18 billion, predominantly European-owned, and the clearest evidence yet that what Europe lacks was never talent or ambition. 

Both readings can be true at once, which is what makes the conversation worth having. If Europe can build a frontier-scale AI company in its hardest, most sovereignty-critical domain, what is actually missing: capital, compute, procurement, or the willingness to decide at all? Where does CEE stand, strong in engineering and manufacturing yet thin on infrastructure and capital? And what, in 2026, is still an open choice?

Europe’s technological sovereignty depends not only on its ability to build capacity and invest in strategic technologies, but also on creating an agile  legislative environment that empowers European innovators to build, deploy, and compete globally in AI and other emerging sectors. 

This session explores how regulatory simplification and capacity-building must go hand in hand to unlock Europe’s innovation potential. And how can CEE governments champion innovation-friendly policymaking, strengthen Europe’s technological sovereignty, and amplify the region’s voice in shaping the EU’s digital agenda. 

CEE has the engineering talent and research capacity to become Europe’s AI engineering powerhouse. The challenge now is transforming the region from a net exporter of talent into a global magnet for engineers, researchers, and investment.

This discussion explores how universities, governments, and industry can work together to build globally competitive AI ecosystems – from rethinking  curricula and strengthening research capacity to building the incentives that attract investment, retain top talent, and convince both global tech leaders and homegrown champions to plant their engineering and R&D hubs in the region.

Europe generates enormous volumes of data every day – inside factories, warehouses, and marketplaces, but also inside ministries, registries, social services and hospitals. Much of it sits unused and siloed, in companies and states alike. It’s one of Europe’s largest untapped resources, and just as critical to competitiveness as any single technology or industry. Unlocking that value requires AI that acts, not just answers. Agentic systems can reroute deliveries, reprice listings, flag irregular tenders, and move case files forward within existing systems – improving both precision and efficiency. This is where value appears and where the digital and physical economies meet.    

This session looks beyond the chatbot layer of AI to explore how we put data to work, from real-time decisions on factory floors to smarter public administration, bolstering private innovation and improving public efficiency. In the race for tech sovereignty, can CEE lead the way in building an “AI-powered future” that optimizes data flows, empowers citizens, and drives economic growth? 

The transition from paper to paperless was only the beginning. We are now entering a deeper transformation: from the Digital State to the Agentic State, where the government is built around AI systems that can understand goals, plan, coordinate and act. Governments that do not make the transition to an agentic state are about to face an agentic flood: millions of AI agents acting on behalf of citizens, companies and other institutions, overwhelming existing portals and processes at machine speed. 

In this conversation, Luukas Ilves explores what it means to govern at agentic pace: why yesterday’s “perfect digital state” can become tomorrow’s constraint; where the first pieces of the Agentic State are already emerging around the world; and what governments will need to rethink – from identity, authorization and delegation to machine-readable rules, accountability and human control – as they move from process-driven bureaucracy toward a state capable of operating continuously, interacting with agents at scale and organizing itself around outcomes.