From Autonomy to Architecture

Opening the third session, Alberto Giovanni Busetto, long-time advocate for ethical innovation, reframed sovereignty as an engineering question rather than a nationalist claim.

“Sovereignty isn’t nostalgia,” he declared. “It’s architecture — the capacity to design systems that keep decision-making, data, and value within reach of citizens.”

For Busetto, Switzerland’s challenge is to transform its reputation for neutrality into a productive neutrality: a hub where trust, compliance, and interoperability become exportable assets.
He invited four entrepreneurs to demonstrate how this philosophy translates into practice: diplomacy, real estate, orbital infrastructure, and venture capital.

Diplomacy as Digital Infrastructure

Jérôme Crettol, Co-Founder of Diplotools, set the tone with a concrete example of Swiss sovereignty in action.
His company builds an AI operating system for diplomacy, currently used by more than thirty foreign ministries and international agencies.

“Data localization is not bureaucracy; it’s security,” he stated. “When you control where your diplomatic knowledge resides, you control your agency in the world.”

Crettol described how foreign ministries rely on Swiss-hosted systems for confidential negotiation data, translating trust into both technical and moral capital.
Switzerland, he argued, can become the world’s custodian of cognitive neutrality—a place where sensitive datasets are processed without geopolitical risk.
His vision aligned with Busetto’s notion of “Sovereignty as a Service.”

Structuring the Physical World

Next, Géraud de Laval, Co-Founder of Recarta, transported the discussion from embassies to building sites.
Switzerland, he explained, manages trillions of francs in real-estate value, yet its documentation remains “frozen in PDFs.”
Recarta’s mission is to extract, structure, and analyze urban data so that cities can plan sustainably.

“A city that doesn’t understand its buildings,” he said, “cannot plan its future — and a nation that can’t read its own data is not sovereign.”

He announced that Recarta is collaborating with EPFL to train an open Swiss domain LLM capable of reasoning on public-sector datasets — an approach that embodies the European model of responsible AI: open, auditable, and regionally trained.
De Laval summarized the ethos simply: “Transparency is our defense.”

Frugal AI for a Finite Planet

Alex Kummerman, Co-Founder of SGDL and veteran of space robotics, introduced what he calls the “Logic of Space.”
His early code still runs aboard satellites, and from that experience he draws a conviction: “Frugal AI is sovereign AI.”
Large models, he warned, may soon become asymmetrical weapons of influence, controlled by a handful of platforms.
Instead, Europe should develop modular intelligence, systems that can run locally, communicate peer-to-peer, and consume minimal energy.
He compared it to the design of orbital systems: “In space, you can’t just scale. You must optimize.”
This philosophy, he argued, fits the Swiss temperament: precise, efficient, and independent.

Compliance as Competitiveness

Ex-Venture capitalist and now Co-Founder, Yann Ranchère, partner at Motley Capital, injected realism.

“Clients don’t buy ideology,” he said. “They buy compliance.”
He noted that regulatory credibility is becoming a competitive advantage: investors now assess AI projects by the traceability of their data and their adherence to ethical frameworks.
Ranchère urged startups to build “regulatory by design” rather than treating compliance as an afterthought.
“Being slow isn’t the problem,” he added. “Being opaque is.”
For him, Swiss startups can scale globally if they remain the most trusted, not the biggest.

The Spectrum of Sovereignty

Synthesizing the four interventions, Busetto outlined a continuum that stretches from full infrastructure control to open collaboration.
At one end: the national foundations of compute, data centers, and power grids.
At the other: transnational alliances built on open standards and shared ethics.
Switzerland, small but credible, can anchor both.

“True sovereignty,” he concluded, “is the art of choosing interdependence without dependence.”

He cited the emerging Apertus Swiss LLM as a tangible illustration of this balance — a shared, auditable language model designed to serve multiple nations that refuse the binary choice between Washington and Beijing.
In his words: “All the small Davids can ally against the Goliaths.”

The Geopolitics of Trust

The conversation returned repeatedly to trust—as infrastructure, as product, as export.
Crettol described it diplomatically: “When others store their data here, they trust our laws more than our servers.”
De Laval added an environmental dimension: Swiss hydropower allows low-carbon compute, a factor that could transform neutrality into sustainability leadership.
Kummerman envisioned decentralized networks where each node is accountable, mirroring the Swiss political system of subsidiarity.
Ranchère framed it economically: “Trust creates liquidity. When rules are clear, capital moves.”

Together, their perspectives suggested a new geopolitical identity: Switzerland as the custodian of digital commons, bridging East, West, and South through credible technology.

From Ideals to Industry

Busetto closed by challenging the panel to move beyond discourse.
He argued that a “Sovereign AI Strategy for Switzerland” must now converge three pillars:

1. Infrastructure — energy, compute, and network capacity.

2. Knowledge — education, AI literacy, and research funding.

3. Industry — startups, corporates, and public-sector procurement.

Each panelist offered a next step:

• Crettol called for federal data zones where innovation can occur under Swiss jurisdiction.

• De Laval advocated open funding mechanisms for LLM training projects.

• Kummerman urged the creation of a “Swiss Compute Corps”, a public-private grid of efficient nodes.

• Ranchère proposed an AI Regulatory Sandbox supervised by the FINMA model.

Their proposals converged on a shared belief: sovereignty is built through doing, not declaring.

Strategic Synthesis — From Neutrality to Agency

Track 3 revealed Switzerland at a crossroads.
It cannot compete on scale with continental powers, but it can lead on governance, precision, and trust.
The country’s small size becomes an advantage when translated into agility and credibility.

“Neutrality was our past,” Busetto said in closing. “Agency is our future.”

In the Swiss ecosystem of AI, sovereignty is no longer a shield but a strategic design principle — a method to align infrastructure, values, and markets in a rapidly polarizing world.