Börje Ekholm, who was CEO of Stockholm-based Ericsson until September, called on Western nations to collaborate to blunt the growing influence of autocracies on technology. Democracies must also come together to revive a rules-based order to underpin the AI-enabled future, he said.
“We’re in a race between a democratic ecosystem and a non-democratic ecosystem,” Ekholm told CEPA’s annual awards gala in Washington after he was presented with the Global Impact Award. “To win, we must collaborate across all democratic countries instead of fragmenting ourselves.”
Ekholm, who remains an adviser to his successor at Ericsson after stepping down as CEO, outlined a future in which everyone has AI agents and robots in their homes and shares personal and private information about their lives.
“I encourage you all to travel to China, and you will see this actually coming alive today, in advanced drone deliveries, you’ll see it in advanced home robotics solutions, and it’s all built on a very strong 5G network,” he said. “Democratic countries are no longer the technology leaders.”
The old rules-based order, which was developed when democracies were the undisputed leaders in technology, has been “broken,” he said. The free world must unite to agree on what a new order should look like.
“We cannot afford to talk about ‘sovereignty,’ or to balance American and Chinese ecosystems, or form separate sub-blocks of countries; we need to collaborate much more,” he said. “I prefer my personal information to be shared in an ecosystem that’s open and based on the rule of law than with a capital in a non-democratic state.”
The amount of data being shared in the future will need to be protected by trusted, reliable, and secure digital infrastructure, he said.
“We’ll share a lot of private information from our homes, from our devices, from our cars, and in that world, trust in the digital stack will be fundamental,” he told attendees at the gala.
This is why Ericsson partnered with Microsoft and others last year to launch a Trusted Tech Alliance “to define what is needed to make a trusted stack,” Ekholm said.
“I’m an optimist and a naïve believer in democracies, but I feel we face a formidable challenge right now,” he said. “It’s critical for the democratic countries that we focus on creating leading technologies that will allow us to generate prosperity and wealth, and we will build that on a safer and trusted ecosystem.”
Thomas Penny is an editor and writer based in London. He has worked for local, national, and international news organizations, including the Mail on Sunday, the Daily Telegraph, Bloomberg News, and CEPA, and is now a freelance specializing in international relations, politics, and conflict.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
