Dansk IT: EU's biggest digital challenges have more to do with human competence than technology access

Across the EU, we see the outline of a digital paradigm shift - from systems to people, from digitalisation to digital literacy, and from technology focus to trust focus. Europe's digital competitiveness increasingly depends on citizens' ability to translate the opportunities of technology into value for themselves, companies and society. 

From IT infrastructure investments to IT skills: the full picture 

At the end of June, a major EU conference on Member States' digitalisation took place. Dansk IT participated in it on behalf of the Danish coalition under the EU initiative the Digital Skills & Jobs Platform. The expectation for the conference was for each Member State to describe unique challenges faced - with some primarily technical - such as lack of IT infrastructure having led to narrowed access to IT skills. 

Yet, a clear and surprisingly uniform pattern emerged: the biggest digital challenges facing European countries are less and less about access to technology, and increasingly about human competence. 

Europe may be lagging behind still when it comes to the adoption, uptake and deployment of frontier digital technologies - but massive investment in infrastructure and systems across the EU is well underway, and that equation is bound to change. Faced with this rapid shift, the digital transition rests more upon the ability of citizens and businesses to turn technology into value on the ground, rather than mindless adoption. 

Barriers to digitalisation: focus on digital competence 

For a number of countries at the digitalisation conference, the main barriers remained uncertainty, lack of motivation and limited understanding of the possibilities of technologies. But this is far from all, and the list goes on... It is more difficult to reach adults with skills development initiatives - more so compared to children and youngsters. On the business side, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) continue to experience difficulties in keeping up with recent developments in the digital world. This causes further bottlenecks in the labour market, with hundreds of vacancies and posts going unfilled due to lack of suitable candidates. The shortage of digital talent is impacting negatively all sectors, but especially STEM and IT, where there is an urgent need for more digital specialists. Lack of trust in digital services and the institutions behind them is yet another barrier to digitalisation. 

Most "digital" problems are mainly due to cybercrime, digital hybrid warfare, and misinformation. Yet, they also reflect the increased complexity of European societies and life in general. Taken together, all of this weakens EU citizens’ perceptions of control, security and clarity.

The debate about the consequences of high societal complexity runs to that extent also in Denmark: a new Megafon study from June 2026 documents that almost 1 out of every 3 Danes believe that it has become harder or much harder to communicate with the public sector within just the past 2 years. This highlights another need: not only to raise EU citizens' digital competences in the traditional, technical sense - but also to acknowledge their declining trust in digitalisation. 

AI may be here to stay, but let that not stop us from learning

Artificial intelligence (AI), of course, also took up a lot of space during the conference. Here, consensus was that development calls for strong basic digital skills, critical digital understanding and lifelong learning. 

Several member states stressed a growing need for ‘AI Literacy’, which not only enables citizens to create value through the use of AI technology, but also ensures that they understand its limitations and consequences.

Here, a distinction can be made between three levels of digital competence: User competence, creative competence and reflexive competence. The reflexive competence seems to become increasingly important as more and more processes in society are digitised, and together we must decide what role we want AI to play in society.

Digital sovereignty, resilience and trust: the cornerstones of successful digitalisation practices

Digital sovereignty was also a recurring theme for the conference. Interestingly, the reflection was not so much on the development of sovereign European technology platforms, but rather on competent citizens, digitally resilient organisations and on increasing trust in public digital solutions.

If people and businesses are to switch to European solutions, they must be motivated to do so; it requires that they have the skills to reflect on why digital sovereignty is beneficial to them personally and to society as a whole.  Europe's digital competitiveness increasingly depends on how well we succeed in developing our human capital, which must translate the opportunities of technology into value for citizens, businesses and society.