5th Polish Economic & Technology Forum

Europe Is Figuring Out Its Tech Future. Here’s What the Conversation Actually Sounds Like.

A dispatch from the 5th Polish Economic & Technology Forum in Switzerland, and what it means for the future of work.

Some conferences leave you with a bag full of branded pens and a LinkedIn connection you’ll never message. Others leave you with a head full of questions you hadn’t thought to ask before.

Last week in Zurich, we were at the latter kind.

The 5th Polish Economic & Technology Forum in Switzerland brought together governments, business institutions, and technology companies from Poland and Switzerland to talk about where Europe is heading - technologically, economically, and strategically. Semiconductors. Cybersecurity. Digital sovereignty. AI. The agenda read like a list of everything that keeps serious people up at night right now, and the conversations matched it.

We left with more questions than we arrived with. As far as we’re concerned, that’s exactly the point.

What Was Actually Being Discussed

This wasn’t a room full of people agreeing with each other. The conversations had real friction, which is a good sign.

The forum agenda covered semiconductors, cybersecurity, Europe’s technological sovereignty, and emerging digital technologies, but what made it useful wasn’t the topics. It was the specificity of the people addressing them. Engineers who build things. Policymakers who have to make decisions with incomplete information. Company founders who are trying to compete globally without the infrastructure advantages of Silicon Valley or Shenzhen.

One of the sessions explored a counterintuitive argument: that the main bottleneck in scaling the energy transition isn’t hardware, but intelligence — the algorithms, not the batteries. That’s the kind of reframing that matters. It shifts where the investment goes, where the talent needs to be, and what “competitive advantage” actually means in a sector that’s moving this fast.

The semiconductor conversation followed a similar logic. Europe knows it has a dependency problem. The question is what to do about it and how fast.

Digital Sovereignty Is Not an Abstract Concept Anymore

For years, “digital sovereignty” was the kind of phrase that appeared in policy documents and then quietly disappeared. That’s changing.

For 56% of respondents in a recent study on the Polish market, technological sovereignty is a priority, and as many as 71% declare a willingness to pay a “sovereignty premium” and support local technologies. Those aren’t small numbers. That’s a genuine shift in how citizens - not just politicians - think about technology dependence.

What’s driving it is a growing awareness that handing your data, your infrastructure, and your critical systems to a handful of global platforms is a strategic vulnerability. Europe learned this in energy. It’s learning it now in semiconductors. The question being asked at forums like this one is whether it’s still possible to course-correct - or whether the dependencies are already too deep.

The honest answer, based on what was discussed in Zurich: it’s possible, but the window is not wide open.

The Part That Doesn’t Get Talked About Enough

Here’s what we noticed. The conversations about semiconductors, cybersecurity, and sovereign infrastructure are serious and necessary. But they’re largely conversations about hardware - about where things are built, who controls the supply chains, which countries own which critical assets.

What gets less attention is the human infrastructure layer. Because you can build all the chip factories and data centers you want. If European companies can’t get their teams to collaborate effectively across borders - if knowledge stays siloed inside national systems, if distributed teams can’t learn and work together without flying to the same room - the hardware advantage doesn’t compound the way it should.

This is where the future of work conversation belongs in the same room as the digital sovereignty conversation. Not as an afterthought. As a core part of the strategy.

Where Alterland Fits

We didn’t go to Zurich to pitch. We went to listen and to be part of a dialogue that we think matters.

The future of work we’re building at Alterland sits at the intersection of everything that was discussed. An all-in-one VR training ecosystem that lets organisations run immersive learning and collaboration across borders, time zones, and office walls, without the logistics overhead that makes distributed work expensive and exhausting.

That’s not just a product decision. It’s a bet on what European competitiveness actually requires.

If Europe is going to close the gap in semiconductors, AI, and cybersecurity, it’s going to need teams that can learn fast, upskill continuously, and collaborate without friction - whether they’re in Warsaw, Zurich, Amsterdam, or Tallinn. Physical proximity can’t be the prerequisite for high-quality knowledge transfer. Not at the speed this is moving.

Immersive technology is one serious answer to that problem. Not because it’s novel, but because it works - and because the alternative (flying everyone to the same room for every meaningful learning event) doesn’t scale at the pace Europe needs.

On Being in the Room

A huge thank you to Max Dropinski and Dorota Kafara for putting together an event that actually delivered. Forums that generate real friction, real disagreement, and real questions are hard to build. This one did.

And to the speakers - the level of knowledge and intellectual seriousness in that room was something to take note of. Europe has the people. The question is whether it will build the systems, and the habits of collaboration, to put them to work together effectively.

We think it can. We’re building part of that answer.

Good to be in the room. Literally and figuratively.