Happy Hump Day {{first_name | Toaster}} 🐪 ,

Digital sovereignty asks a simple question: who controls the technology your country, your company, and your career depend on? This means cloud providers, enterprise software, AI infrastructure, and data storage.

In recent news, France has decided to dump Zoom and Teams. After the US sanctioned the International Criminal Court’s top prosecutor, Microsoft reportedly cut off his email account. One policy decision meant entire access is gone.

The concern is that if your national systems run on foreign-owned platforms, access can be cut due to sanctions, policy shifts, or compliance decisions made elsewhere. Digital sovereignty is about ensuring that critical infrastructure cannot be switched off by someone outside your borders.

According to the World Economic Forum, governments across Europe are now investing in local cloud infrastructure, AI models, and data governance frameworks to reduce dependence on US and Chinese tech giants.

In Canada, the conversation is more complicated. We want to protect Canadian data and build domestic capacity, but we are deeply embedded in US platforms. Switching is expensive, building alternatives takes years, and talent often flows south. So the uncomfortable question lingers: how sovereign are we if our infrastructure is rented?

This matters for women in tech because infrastructure shapes power. From biased AI to platform policies, we already know systems are not neutral. Now governments are rebuilding cloud and AI infrastructure at scale. Women remain underrepresented in the rooms where those decisions get made. When billions flow into new tech stacks, who gets to design them matters.

Rebuilds create power shifts. They can mean vendor lock-in, opaque contracts, or a handful of giant companies quietly becoming the backbone of democracies.

Digital sovereignty is not anti-innovation. It is about leverage and aligning infrastructure with values. We need to ensure that a policy decision in one country cannot quietly disable systems in another.

The future of infrastructure is being renegotiated in real time. If sovereignty is about control, then representation in the build phase is strategic. We are not here to be passive users of systems designed without us. We need to help design what comes next.

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Overview:

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Learning Outcomes:

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Each week focuses on a core skill: 

Facilitator: The program is led by Diondra Filicetti, author of the best-selling leadership book Engagement Economics, where she explores how clarity, trust, and environment drive engagement and performance. 

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