Engineering brings the European challenge for sovereign and secure AI to Brussels

The event “Sovereign AI for Europe: IS-IA, Engineering Group’s Italian Digital Architecture” was held at the European Parliament, promoted by Engineering and co-hosted by European Parliament Vice-Presidents Pina Picierno and Antonella Sberna.

Moderated by Michelangelo Suigo, Group Chief Public Affairs, Corporate Communication & Sustainability Officer at Engineering, the event brought together representatives from the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Permanent Representation of Italy to the European Union for a discussion on European technological sovereignty and the role of Artificial Intelligence in the Union’s economic, industrial and social development.

At the heart of the discussion was the need to develop sovereign, secure and governable AI, enabling companies and Public Administrations to leverage the best technologies available while retaining control over their data, infrastructure, models and the knowledge assets generated through their use. From this perspective, sovereignty does not mean isolation or technological autarky, but rather the ability to choose solutions and providers without creating excessive dependencies or giving up operational and decision-making autonomy.

During his speech, Aldo Bisio, CEO of Engineering, presented IS-IA, Italy’s Sovereign Intelligence Architecture, the architectural approach developed by Engineering on its proprietary private GenAI platform, EngGPT 2. The goal is to enable organisations to use Artificial Intelligence while retaining control over data, models and knowledge, keeping them within secure, controllable and transparent environments. Bisio also presented EngSure, the new agentic cybersecurity platform that uses Artificial Intelligence to strengthen the protection of organisations’ digital assets and safeguard the AI ecosystem throughout its entire lifecycle.

The following speakers took part in the event:

• Pina Picierno, Vice-President of the European Parliament
• Alberto La Bella, Telco Coordinator at the Permanent Representation of Italy to the European Union
• Aldo Bisio, CEO of Engineering
• Miriam D’Arrigo, Legal and Policy Officer at the European Commission’s AI Office
• Nicola Zingaretti, Member of the European Parliament and Head of the Democratic Party delegation
• Francesco Torselli, Member of the European Parliament and member of the ITRE Committee

In his remarks, Aldo Bisio, CEO of Engineering, said: “The race towards increasingly large and complex Artificial Intelligence models is not necessarily the path Europe needs to follow. When we move from training to post-training and specialise models for individual industries or the specific contexts of institutions, more agile and flexible models can deliver comparable results while requiring far fewer resources. This is the approach we followed in developing IS-IA, an open and modular architecture that makes it possible to select and orchestrate different models according to specific needs, and EngGPT 2, our generative Artificial Intelligence model. This is where I see a major opportunity for Europe: investing in AI specialisation, skills and the data architectures needed to effectively integrate AI into production processes and institutions. At this stage, control over and the quality of data become even more important than the choice of any individual model. Technological sovereignty does not mean autarky, but governability, freedom of choice and control.”