A Letter from the Advisory Board

Bruno Costa,

Director of Cloud Innovation Office, Saint-Gobain Group Digital & IT

^{Opening Letter}

Bruno Costa

Director of Cloud Innovation Office, Saint-Gobain Group Digital & IT

The infrastructure decisions made with confidence over the last decade as part of broader digital transformation initiatives are now being re-examined under different lighting. This is not a failure of those decisions.

Cloud adoption gave organizations escape velocity from ageing data centers, relief from complex and rigid capacity planning cycles, and a way through the organizational barriers that had made faster innovation feel impossible.

Those initiatives were right for their moment, and many are still being defended to boards, CFOs, and

business units - and rightly so.

But the moment is shifting.

Data sovereignty and Agentic AI represent something more disruptive than a new capability layer for infrastructure, they force an entirely different line of questioning.

Which is about: data quality at its source, identity models built for humans that now need to cover digital workers, cost structures not yet fully integrated, new skills that have yet to emerge, security paradigms that perimeters alone were never designed to handle, and governance

frameworks that were never designed for systems capable of acting fully autonomously at three in the morning without a change ticket.

This publication emerged from a structured executive discussion convened, not to produce consensus or validate anyone's thesis, but to create the conditions for honest, unfiltered conversation amongst senior technology and business leaders.

What follows is the result of that discussion, enriched with practitioner insight, real-world experience, and editorial commentary. It is published in the spirit of Chatham House – the ideas belong to the conversation; the individuals do not.