Speakers:

Welcome word by Bernard Siman, Senior Associate Fellow, Egmont Institute.

Janis Sarts, Director, NATO StratCom COE

Sinead Bovell, Futurist and founder of WAYE, Canada

Leevi Saari, EU Policy Fellow, AI Now Institute

Moderator: Elina Lange-Ionatamishvili, Senior Expert, NATO StratCom COE

The NATO StratCom COE has launched a research programme to explore how emerging technologies transform information environments and change the trajectories of societies. The recent NextGen Information Environment report by the Centre lays he foundation for this research. It synthesises insights of a global group of experts, gathered during 2025 in cooperation with Emmanuel College, Cambridge and St Peter’s College, Oxford. The Centre also steered discussions on the topic at the Munich Security Conference 2026, London Defence Conference 2026 and the Allies in Ankara public forum of the NATO Summit 2026. As Europe’s strategic interests, role and capabilities featured prominently in these discussions, the NATO StratCom COE now brings the conversation to Brussels.

The information environment is where modern democratic process unfolds: it is the space in which citizens form beliefs, institutions earn or lose trust, and societies deliberate based on what they perceive as truth. Emerging technologies, such as generative AI, synthetic media, algorithmic curation, increasingly autonomous systems, are reshaping that space faster than our institutions can adapt. Our adversaries have understood and are learning how to exploit this flaw. Before Europe has figured out how these technologies can serve democratic societies, hostile actors are already using them to take advantage of our openness, our trust in institutions, and our commitment to free expression.

This is the paradox Europe must confront: the very qualities that make our information environment democratic — openness, pluralism, freedom of speech — are also the vulnerabilities adversaries exploit in cognitive warfare. Defending democracy in this environment cannot mean closing it down. It means building the capacity to out-innovate, out-adapt, and out-pace those who would exploit it. We also have to be honest about the price of doing so. Are we ready to tolerate experimentation and failure, to sustain investment and institutional will to move at the speed of the threat?

The instinct to meet fast-moving technological change with more, and faster, regulation is understandable. But regulation alone cannot secure a democratic information environment. The real question is not what or how much we regulate, but how well we pre-emptively build a technological, institutional, and human ecosystem that lets Europe’s information environment remain both free and resilient.

This closed-door gathering will bring together policymakers, technologists, investors, security practitioners, and media with a direct stake in Europe’s democratic and information resilience, to share cutting-edge thinking and explore concrete, innovative pathways for Europe to lead.

The discussion will focus on:

• The shift to initiative: what it takes for Europe to move beyond a purely defensive posture, to anticipate, shape, and where required, contest the information space on its own terms.
• Space to experiment: adaptive governance models and public-private innovation partnerships that let Europe test new approaches without sacrificing democratic openness.
• People and capital to build it: what would make Europe a magnet for the talent and investment needed to shape its own information environment.
• European-grown capability: how to enable the scaling-up of European tech to the point where it can meaningfully defend and strengthen Europe’s information space.

The NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (established 2014, Riga) is a multinational organisation accredited by NATO and dedicated to building the Alliance’s capabilities in strategic communications. Over the past two years, we have focused on how emerging technologies may shape the future information environment and, in turn, affect democratic systems and open new vectors of attack. This work includes a dedicated Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where we experiment and build tools to understand and shape the information space. The Centre is currently comprised of 16 nations. More at: stratcomcoe.org  

(Photo credit: Canva teams)