Brokers of Digital Sovereignty – Infrastructural Dependencies in the AI-enabled Welfare State
10th December 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM GMT
As European governments increasingly adopt AI systems to advance public-sector innovation and digital sovereignty, they often become entangled in new types of infrastructural dependency on global technology platforms. This talk examines how local suppliers of public AI systems act as brokers between welfare states and Big Tech, embedding cloud services, software, APIs and other critical infrastructures into public-sector technologies. Drawing on a dataset of 539 AI systems deployed in the Danish public sector across education, health, employment and more, we map these supplier networks and show how everyday technological choices create dependencies and power asymmetries that challenge ambitions of democratic accountability, economic sustainability and digital sovereignty. By making visible the infrastructures underpinning public AI, the talk highlights why the technical and commercial foundations of the AI-enabled welfare state warrant greater scholarly and democratic scrutiny.
Speaker Biography
Signe Sophus Lai is an Associate Professor in the Center for Tracking and Society at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research on the political economy of digital infrastructures advances new empirical methods for studying digital communication systems and develops a critical agenda on digital infrastructural power. She is co-founder of the Digital Infrastructure Think Tank and has co-authored four books published with, amongst others, Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan, on digital methods, infrastructure, and communication systems.
