Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's an honor to be here with you today and moderate this first panel discussion. And Justin and Rafa, a warm welcome to both of you.
Look, we've just heard presidents and prime ministers and foreign ministers talk about the serious security situation and hybrid attacks and what's ahead, how to prepare. So Justin, you were in the audience. What stood out to you?
Well, I actually think it was the first comment that President Stubb made, and he talked about the fact that the private sector and military action are now coming together. And the reality, as being a global provider of network technology and connectivity technology, is this has been the case for a long time. The shift that's happened is that in the past, or in the current, let's say it was primarily around two things: intelligence gathering and economic espionage, right? Effectively, what's changed is that it's become offensive. And what we realize with AI, and especially as we move into the world of physical AI, is that there'll be even more overlap and more risk to manage. So I think his point was very accurate. It's one of the reasons we're so vocal about the importance of having trusted networks when you build digital infrastructure, but also why we see this significant opportunity around defense and the commonality of the technology that's happening.
He also mentioned that the private sector can speed up things also when strengthening military forces.
He did. He touched on that as well. And obviously, I think you could probably look to my left to Rafal for a great example of the private sector speeding it up. And one of the things at Nokia that we're, you know, as we're transforming the company, we're getting much more focused on getting back to our core of innovation. And you know, the reality is military applications have been a source of innovation, you know, for a long, long time. In fact, I spent, you know, part of my career in supercomputing. And this is a place where, you know, we think about, we talk a lot about the nuclear threat today, but, you know, nuclear proliferation, managing stockpiles. This was a place where there was significant advantage leveraged by supercomputing. And this is an area where, you know, we see this again coming where connectivity will be a great equalizer. It's also a place where AI is going to drive a lot of competitiveness.
Yeah. And before we talk about sovereignty and your cooperation more, I'd still like to understand a little bit about the discussions you are having. You both spend a lot of time outside Finland, Justin in the United States and Rafa in Poland. And Rafa, Finland and Poland are both frontline states. What are business leaders in Poland talking about when it comes to security?
Look, I think it's very similar to what's happening over here. There is a lot of discussions around what has to change versus how we used to operate in the past. The military and the business were two different worlds. They obviously were forced to collaborate to a certain level, but that collaboration was always shielded with a wall, and the flow of information was not a fast flow. Everybody realizes, based on what's happening in Ukraine, that you can't do that anymore. You have to work hand in hand between the private sector, the industry, and the military. One has to learn from the other. The requirements, the feedback, those have to flow very quickly. So I think that's definitely in the core of the discussion. There's also the very much realization that in order to achieve a certain level of resilience within those nations, you have to achieve technological sovereignty, and that technological sovereignty is achieved through the development of certain capabilities, critical core capabilities, whether in networks or intelligence, by the companies present one way or the other within the territory. And I think those companies and the business leaders very often feel not only the need from the business perspective but also a patriotic call to develop certain capabilities that didn't exist within the country so that they can ensure that those will be provided in the future.
Okay. And Justin, when you talk to your peers in the US, what geopolitical risks are they most concerned about?
You know, I think many of the comments that Rafal made are similar. I would say there's also a view of a technology race, right? Particularly with AI, the focus, there's a lot of discussion today in the media about the risks of AI. There's not enough discussion about the risk of losing this race. And the risk of losing this race means more capable technology on the adversarial side and on the warfront. So if you think about what's happening in Ukraine, you know, a more intelligent, more capable platform that can drive a swarm of drones means greater military success. And I think, you know, when we talk about this, you know, a bit, we tend to focus on all of the things that AI can do, you know, a model could do to potentially harm, and we miss the risk that if someone has a very powerful set of capabilities and we don't have those same capabilities, sovereignty is actually much more at risk because independence will be at risk.
Yeah. So rather than talking so much about the risks and the doomsday scenarios, you'd say that we need to be concerned about in Europe about not losing the whole game.
Yeah, I agree. I would say that the thing that I think about quite a bit is sovereignty is very important, and Rafal touched on some of the themes, but sovereignty doesn't exist without competitiveness. Sovereignty without competitiveness is isolation, and isolation is not a great outcome. And the reality, as we sit here in Finland and in Europe, is that neither the US nor Europe can win in a war of isolation. Everyone needs sovereignty, but sovereignty also comes from interdependence. And much like Rafal talked about with the public and the private sector and the speed of innovation, that interdependence is collaboration with the private and public sector, it's the collaboration across nations, and it's the pace of innovation so that we ensure we have both the competitiveness and then the control such that sovereignty can be assured.
Yeah. So technological sovereignty, I'd like to hear, Rafael, how you would also define it, because we can't do in Europe everything on our own. So where does Europe need to be sovereign and where can it rely on others? If you could give a couple of examples.
I'm glad that you asked for a couple of examples because the entire list is pretty complex, and I would not dare to try to define it all over here. Look, maybe two comments. One, 100% agree with Justin on the fact that the US and Europe ultimately are so much more aligned than many other of the geopolitical players that it is to the benefit of both to have a competitive, let's say, properly structured competitive market in which the capabilities that we both need are being developed at pace and at cost and are provided to respective governments in a way that is making this available. And I think the threat of losing the technological race is actually much more severe than what we usually give it credit for. And we have to realize that the current conflicts show us that you cannot be behind in terms of technological development by years anymore. I mean, if you are a few years behind your adversary in what's the newest and the most advanced, you are losing straight out, right? So you don't have the time to wait. You really have to be at the cutting edge of all of those critical technologies. Now, on the other hand, I do want to throw out a second comment over there because I think there's still a tendency to believe that Europe does not have a capability to possess large amounts of complex technologies. I understand where this comment is coming from. Historically, maybe we have not been the best at accumulating complex capabilities on the industrial scale in Europe, but I don't fundamentally believe there is any reason why we couldn't possess significantly more, why we couldn't stand a chance to compete with companies from the US on a more frequent basis in the majority of the fields. Chips are definitely one, battery production is definitely one. Now, look, which I believe would have to be fully independent. This is hard to say, right? I think we should have, there's obviously part of the healthcare ecosystem where that dependency is clearly something where we have to have enough capability internally that we can deal with challenges like COVID or similar. But I think this is where we are quite fine on a technological side. You know, our view is obviously that the space technology is one of the bits that we have sort of stayed behind and we have to catch up. The dependency was quite big, and this is the place where we have to develop more. When you go down in the supply chain in the space technology, the integrated circuits are actually probably next, and this is where Nokia has been doing really a lot of work. But we do see that the integrated circuits in Europe, the joint ventures that we have put together, have not always been successful. The dependency that the US has on Taiwan is also true. But that doesn't mean that if they are solving this, we should not be trying to solve one for ourselves. So this is probably the one that I would focus on as the next big one outside of the space, which is obviously the one close to my heart.
Justin, do you want to add something? Where can we rely on others and where not?
I think Rafal summarized it well. It's very complex, but what I would say is a couple of things. First of all, there is no story of complete independence. In fact, the only place maybe that will exist at some point is China. But even there, it does not exist today. So if you look at this, we are in a world of interdependence. And the key thing for me is picking the control points. One of the things, if you look at what we're building together and what we announced yesterday, it's one of the places where we see an important control point: having control over your communications network. There are other places in silicon, as Raphael talked about, where there should be investments to try to develop control points. There are other places where a partner that respects sovereignty, and we've announced some partnerships with American companies that respect sovereignty around their solutions and how they implement, you know, air gap technology or independence in cloud infrastructure, for example, solutions like that also we need to leverage and adopt. So it's picking a balance of right-minded partners, innovation, and then ensuring that the control sits with, you know, with the appropriate entity for some of these key technologies. And I think it's, you know, as Rafal said, it's a journey. And obviously, you know, as a leading technology company in Europe, we're confident that Nokia has an important part to play in this.
Definitely. Well, let's take your cooperation as an example. ISAI and Nokia announced yesterday that you're now working together to build secure European communications in space. Tell us a little bit more about what you are doing. Who wants to go first? You want to go first?
Not too technical. Not for me, please.
