Interview Gérald SANTUCCI - ENSA (European Education New Society Association)
1) ENSA’s mission is to accelerate the transition to a Digital Economy and Sustainable and Resilient Society. How do you see financial institutions and technology providers such as those present at TRUSTECH contributing concretely to this transformation?
ENSA is convinced the world is staged in a process of unprecedented and continuing scientific and technological change bringing new tools and abilities. Indeed, the internet, mobile telephony, social media, the internet of things, and artificial intelligence have already altered the course of human history, and even if many people believe that we are poised to potentially resolve whatever vast, outstanding issues confront us, technology equally undermines sustainability as it enables ever-more effective resource exploitation. What we generally pinpoint as “global issues” – climate change, biodiversity loss – are actually interlinked with what and how we produce and consume.
The impacts of these issues are far-reaching, affecting almost every aspect of our lives: they threaten food and water security; increase the frequency and severity of natural disasters; displace communities; make humanity vulnerable to pandemics; and exacerbate existing social and economic inequalities. It’s not insignificant!
Addressing these global challenges requires a holistic approach that recognizes the interdependence of environmental health and social wellbeing. At ENSA we advocate collaborative efforts among all key stakeholders – governments, businesses, NGOs and communities – to create sustainable solutions that protect our planet and its inhabitants without compromising the chances of creativity, innovation and economic prosperity.
But concretely, if we want action to take place and reach its goals, resources and capacity building must converge. I’ve no problem to admit that current multilateral and international bodies and government-to-government initiatives are useful and have already achieved good results; however, given the severity and continuous amplification of the issues, it is obvious that to channel resources more effectively commands going beyond the existing. We need to edge sharper guidance and motivations for the financial and corporate sectors to meet with the real needs and efforts of achieving sustainability on the ground. And yes, we need co-creative and co-operative initiatives between all private actors to align investments with the gigantic challenge of achieving a sustainable and resilient economy and society.
2) The rapid rise of generative AI, IoT, and blockchain creates both opportunities and systemic risks. From ENSA’s perspective, what policies or frameworks are most urgently needed in Europe to ensure innovation while safeguarding resilience and inclusiveness?
Well, it is getting harder and harder to keep track of EU digital laws, regulations, and new initiatives. This is because of their complexity but also the nuanced ways their various provisions can be interpreted, implemented, and enforced in practice. Furthermore, nearly every aspect of digital technology and governance is a constantly changing moving target, as we can observe in particular with artificial intelligence.
Today, the most essential EU digital laws and regulations are the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the AI Act, the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the Data Act, the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), the eIDAS Regulation, the Data Governance Act (DGA), the NIS2 Directive, the Chips Act, and this list is not exhaustive, far from it, of all the existing legal texts. In addition, they support a number of EU digital horizontal strategies such as the Digital Decade Policy Programme, the Competitiveness Compass, the Single Market Strategy.
Since the beginning of this year, many experts have been calling for simplification of the EU digital rulebook, due to the extensive, overlapping, and at times confusing suite of digital regulatory requirements. The Draghi Report on the future of EU competitiveness, published in September 2024, spurred this discussion as it pointed out three main hindrances that EU companies face from the rising weight of regulation. First, companies need to comply with the accumulation of or frequent changes to EU legislation over time. Second, they face an extra burden due to national transposition, for instance as Member States implement laws with divergent requirements and standards from one country to another. GDPR in particular has been implemented with a significant degree of fragmentation which undermines the EU’s digital goals. Third, EU regulation imposes a proportionally higher burden on SMEs and small mid-caps than on larger companies.
Therefore, it is not surprising that over the last few months, the political discourse has become much more sensitive to the priorities of speed, coherence, and simplification in everything the Commission does. The Omnibus Digital Simplification Package aims at cutting red tape, reducing costs, and modernizing EU rules as part of the ongoing overall Single Market Simplification effort.
Against this background, to answer your question, the EU has a plethora of laws and regulations which it is willing to “simplify” in order to spur innovation while safeguarding the protection of human fundamental rights. But saying is one thing, doing is another! Can these two different policy goals be pursued at the same time? How should they be balanced, if finding a balance makes sense at all?
The answers are not easy, and even less so when we look at the new reality of the world geopolitics – in the span of a few months, US President Trump has dramatically remade a global trading system that had taken over seventy years to build. Bilateral trade deals have replaced WTO-based multilateral rules, and non-US partners calculated that they couldn’t afford to get into a tit-for-tat escalation, except China, because of the US’s considerable economic leverage. Going back to the EU, I have the impression that the pendulum has swung in the direction of innovation at all costs, at the expense of other essential goals such as sustainability, data protection, human rights, AI ethics, and so forth.
The three AI Summits that have been organized since 2023 illustrate this swing perfectly. At Bletchley Park, in November 2023, the focus was on discussing the safety and regulation of artificial intelligence. In Seoul, in May 2024, it was on fostering the convergence of countries and industry to three critical priorities – safety, innovation and inclusivity. In Paris, in February 2025, it was enlarged to cover further priorities, in particular reconciling the digital transition with the ecological transition, making sure that AI is developed to increase jobs and not to replace them, and to develop an AI that serves the public interest. But it was also an opportunity to announce unprecedented investments in EU AI infrastructures and start-ups, to affirm the European Commission’s commitment to a balanced and effective implementation of the AI Act, and to boost financing of generative AI in European industries.
Looking at all that, I am perplexed by the lack of stability in policy priorities, the pride and boasting of country leaders as they claim world domination in innovation and investment, the excess of announcements and promises that fail to deliver. No doubt Europe must simplify its arsenal of policies and regulations, follow without delay the recommendations of the Draghi Report on competitiveness, but it must never ever give up its values. The way forward is a narrow path.
3) Your keynote will touch on the convergence between digital transformation and circular economy principles, particularly in energy. What lessons from this approach could be applied to sectors like payments, identification, and digital trust infrastructures?
Ionesco allegedly said: “Ideology separates us. Dreams and anguish bring us together”. Taking up the three main phrases in the first part of your question, they actually refer to patterns of thought that have seemingly nothing in common. ‘Digitalization’ embodies an idea of change as improvement, commonly drawn on in creativity and liberty. ‘Circularity’ carries the hope that industry is not incompatible with the minimization of ecological harm and the preservation of natural resources for future human generations. As regards ‘nuclear energy’, we cannot forget that it is linked, in the conscience of many people, with the potential proliferation of nuclear weapons and the vulnerability of its processing plants (i.e. the accidents of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima).
Time has come to move beyond some prejudices and, in the present context, to demonstrate that digitalization, circularity and nuclear energy can push together the boundaries of science, technology and sustainability. On one hand, with the internet of things and artificial intelligence digitalization can strongly support the drive to a circular economy. On the other hand, nuclear energy has emerged as a crucial and sustainable energy source that does not release carbon emissions. So, I’m convinced that only the intertwining of these three words can make the world will be a better place to live in when our generation turns it to the next generation than when we inherited it from the previous generation.
Beyond these words and the developments which they are likely to deliver, what we are talking about is the strategic meaning of “data”. The world rapidly shifts from analogue to digital, and this evolution is of paramount importance and signification as it changes the rules. For example, self-driving connected cars make decisions based not on real events but on data streams which, without the knowledge of the driver, can enable predictive analytics and other forms of augmented decision. Data goes together with the “network” for which all users are “entities” – machines, processes, people – with every “entity” having its own “identity”.
What is true for smart connected cars is also true for the services offered by Over-The-Top players on housing, mobility, music, data storage or for the sectors which you have conjured up in your question – payments, identification, infrastructures.
Data has definitely imposed itself as the new source of value. The future of the digital economy and society will eventually depend on our ability to bring together people from different disciplines and trades to ensure that changes in technology will be seen as true progress in addressing human needs and concerns.
4) Looking at the younger generations digital natives who often take technology for granted how can we make them more aware of the historical efforts that shaped today’s digital education and ensure they are equipped to drive the next wave of innovation responsibly?
I must say I’m very sensitive to the issues of education and digital literacy. This comes probably from the time when I was working on the “Educational Multimedia Software” in the European Commission’s DG CONNECT. This was 30 years ago! The European Commission had taken a series of initiatives in the area of research through the creation of 5 “Research-Industry Task Forces” in different domains of industrial interest, including the educational multimedia software. The objective here was to help improve the quality and effectiveness of education and training systems and provide access to the information society for teachers, students and apprentices by giving them an insight into the use of new digital tools and into training in the subject.
Without high levels of digital fluency across any business, it is not going to be possible to connect domain-specific problems with appropriate digital solutions. Literacy is the driving force behind digital fluency, which is the only way to achieve meaningful results on individual and group digital investments. This said, the solution is not easy. Digital literacy, in particular with respect to AI, internet of things, Blockchain, and tomorrow 6G, is about much more than a one-day training course or a session on how to prompt ChatGPT (contrary to the fallacious promises that spread on a large scale these days).
Of course the easy solution for the younger generations’ digital natives is to take technology for granted, as many from my generation did with 3G, 4G or multimedia telematics, but the reality is that if we want to avoid an ever-increasing digital divide, and more specifically a class-based or urban-rural literacy divide, it is imperative to adopt a foundational, comprehensive and steady approach that embraces several dimensions – operational (i.e. the skills and competences), cultural (i.e. the knowledge of the good practices in specific social and cultural contexts) and critical (i.e. the ability to transform digital literacy practices actively and creatively in order to avoid social control).
Championing digital literacy is something we at ENSA we prioritize and dedicate vast energy to.
5) TRUSTECH brings together start-ups, global companies, regulators, and governments. From your experience at the European Commission and now at ENSA, what kind of cross-sector collaborations are essential to achieve a truly sustainable digital society?
You are right to stress that my experience at the European Commission – from the original DG XIII to the current DG CONNECT – taught me the importance of collaboration in research, development and demonstration activities. In particular, during the 1980s (the ESPRIT and RACE programmes) and the 1990s (the ESPRIT, ACTS and TELEMATICS APPLICATIONS programmes), that is at the time when the political pressure from the EU Member States was on so-called precompetitive, prenormative or even preregulatory research, we strived to define “clusters” of projects by grouping them according to some specific key technologies or socio-economic objectives, and to manage “concertation” between them in order to create synergy and ensure coherence.
The same spirit of knowledge sharing must prevail today in the long quest for a competitive, sustainable and resilient Digital Economy and Society. To take just one example, it is commonly agreed everywhere in the world that we must address ethical considerations and questions that arise from rapid advancements in science and technology, especially in areas of legal ambiguity and moral complexity. Indeed, we need to prevent potential misuse or abuse for unethical purposes. This is not easy because there is a chasm between on one hand, the high level of abstraction of ethical principle frameworks and on the other hand, the granularity needed to answer concrete, context-specific, day-to-day challenges that emerge from data use. So, we need participation from and collaboration between a large variety of stakeholders, not only engineers and scientists, but also experts in digital ethics, law, big data, data governance, customer advocacy. And wherever this takes place, it is essential to avoid the risk that ethics experts will form an isolated entity, which calls for a shrewd balance of independence and integration. Collaboration should not be cosmetic, insular, leaving intact an organization’s siloes, but genuine, enhancing the organization’s readiness for change and capacity for innovation. As I like to say, the acceleration and depth of change in digital technology requires from us to “innovate innovation”.