While executives are busy talking about AI, a deeper shift is taking place, according to Erik Nieuwenburg, managing director of Datarotonde. Increasingly, economic value is being created between organizations rather than within a single organization alone, and that calls for an independent Trusted Digital Exchange Platform to organize that collaboration securely. In the AI Sovereignty & Data Science special from Contentway, distributed via Het Financieele Dagblad, Nieuwenburg explains why digital infrastructure is what makes that exchange possible.

The third phase of digitalization

According to Nieuwenburg, digitalization goes through three phases. First, organizations digitized their own processes; then applications and supply chains were linked together. Now a third phase is emerging: organizations are increasingly becoming part of an ecosystem, where their success is determined by the quality of their collaboration with others — not just by their own systems.

“AI mainly shows how dependent we already are on the digital infrastructures our economy runs on.”

Case in point: the maintenance process in the real estate sector

As an example, Erik points to the maintenance process in the real estate sector: a single maintenance job for a housing corporation can quickly involve the owner, tenant, maintenance provider, contractors, and suppliers, each with their own systems. As a result, one job often consists of more than ten digital steps. Datarotonde’s Trusted Digital Exchange Platform processes more than two billion of these kinds of records each year, covering more than 1.5 million rental homes and over 2,000 connected organizations.

Why independence makes the difference

Nieuwenburg compares digital infrastructure to a port: it’s not the ships that determine the value, but the system that ensures everyone can collaborate under the same rules. He calls that independence crucial — no vested interest in the data and no preference for a single supplier, so that competing parties can still trust one another.

Agentic AI raises the stakes

With the rise of agentic AI, which independently exchanges messages and carries out transactions, he says this only becomes more urgent: “Agentic AI doesn’t create these vulnerabilities — it mainly exposes how robust, or not, the digital infrastructure already is.”

Read the full article here.