IBM describes digital sovereignty as a walled city. Getting the walls all the way around your city is not that simple, and according to IBM, not even necessary.
The Solvay Library in the heart of Brussels’ European Quarter is the setting for an IBM event. A stone’s throw from the EU, sovereignty quickly becomes an unavoidable topic. Frank Ketelaars, who doesn’t just call himself a data and AI engineer but a Distinguished Engineer in these fields, takes us back to what Brussels must have looked like in the fifteenth century.
“What is sovereignty? In essence, it’s about independence. Compare it to a walled city: in your own fortress, your own rules apply and you decide what goes in and out. In the past, that was necessary, because your neighbours could be your enemies. Now it’s more a matter of continuity and optionality: do you have an alternative if a service is no longer available? In many parts of the world, such as the Middle East, that risk is real,” says Ketelaars.
Three questions about control
For Bart Windal, Country General Manager of IBM Belux, sovereignty is just as familiar a topic. “Digital sovereignty has been a hot topic for the past twelve to eighteen months,” says Windal. “The public sector is very vocal about it, but isn’t moving at top speed. Companies are now starting to ask themselves the question too. That’s where an important conversation begins.”
When clients come to him about sovereignty, he puts the same three questions to them every time. “Do you control your data, can you freely make changes and can you also demonstrate that? They are general questions, but they are the essence.”
Fifty shades of grey
According to Windal, sovereignty translates into control over systems and into governance. “There are different views. Organisations need to check what architecture they have, whether an alternative is ready and who has access to the keys. Suppose something happens to your critical infrastructure, can you easily make changes? Almost everyone will say yes, but the question is how quickly and at what cost.”
“It’s not one uniform story for everyone,” says Windal. He speaks of fifty shades of grey, where the question is where you are open and where you are locked in. “For some things, you don’t need to look for sovereign solutions.”
To put clients’ minds at ease, IBM launched Sovereign Core in early 2026, leaving the reins to local partners. In Belgium, that is Cegeka. With Red Hat, IBM also relies heavily on open source to live up to its sovereignty promises.
“OpenShift is an important step, because you can place a container wherever you want. That offers choice. Embracing that openness is in our DNA.” Windal believes IBM has earned trust in other ways. “We have been active in Belgium for ninety years. We are part of our clients’ core processes.”
Tearing down walls
Ketelaars calls AI the “fifth dimension” of sovereignty. “The big models are trained on American data. There is an evolution under way from frontier models to smaller models that run on sovereign data.”
“Many workloads moved to the cloud because it was convenient. But that has made organisations dependent. Service outages or price increases at a provider can have major consequences. AI is now starting to become embedded in processes. Fortunately, the choice in AI is still open. You don’t have to be fully sovereign, but be selective about what you can and must control,” he explains.
Windal sees mainframes playing an important role in the sovereignty story. That should come as no surprise, as IBM is the world’s official supplier of mainframes. In Belgium too, large clients are far from ready to give up their mainframes.
“AI touches core processes, and in many organisations those still run on mainframes. They act as the organisation’s data hub. A large part of the IT budget goes to modernisation today, at some organisations around sixty to eighty percent. Mainframes are not being replaced, but integrated into the new way of thinking to connect the past with the present,” he says.
The 25 percent barrier
It is not the first time the word “AI” comes up during Ketelaars’ keynote. Guest speaker Mieke De Ketelaere, AI expert and adjunct professor at Vlerick Business School, made a less comfortable observation on the same stage. “About a quarter of AI projects succeed. The reasons why so many projects fail are still the same as fifteen years ago.”
De Ketelaere looks for the cause. “Buying licences is the easy part, but what is your business case? Many companies can’t answer that question. As a result, people are forced to use AI.” Part of the problem is that AI is approached like an ordinary IT project. “What has long worked in IT doesn’t necessarily work for AI. What’s more: I would even say not to give AI projects to your IT department.”
She also questions the assumption that AI always has to get bigger, with larger models, more computing power and more data. “The breakthrough of DeepSeek showed that we can also be creative with limited resources.”
The reasons why AI projects fail are the same as fifteen years ago.
Mieke De Ketelaere, adjunct professor Vlerinck Business School
Windal agrees with De Ketelaere that the key to AI success lies in the business case. “Start small and then scale up. C-level approval is needed for this. Tackling a process end to end requires cooperation from several departments and, in large organisations, sometimes even from several companies. Simply injecting AI into existing processes is a bad idea. It’s not a job the IT team can handle alone.”
Long road to quantum-safe
At an IBM event, quantum can’t be missing as a theme either, although it only plays a marginal role. Together with Alexandra Ruez, who leads IBM’s consulting arm in the Benelux, Windal proclaims quantum as the next big thing. They don’t venture a prediction on when the big breakthrough will happen.
“Quantum is tomorrow’s priority and must solve problems that are unsolvable today. It’s not AI versus quantum, but AI with quantum. The opportunity lies in rethinking processes end to end. It’s much more than a technology story,” they say in unison.
According to Windal, companies’ first priority now should be to make themselves “quantum-safe”. “How do you make sure your data and keys stay safe? The financial sector is already actively looking at it. Banks need to have it on their agenda because they are interconnected. The weakest link makes the whole chain vulnerable. In Belgium, there is still a lot of work to do on this front,” he concludes.