The Spanish technological panorama has experienced one of the moments of the year this week with the celebration of ASLAN 2026. At a time when geopolitical uncertainty is taking over everything, more than 8,000 professionals, 150 exhibitors and a hundred top-level speakers have shown what are the priorities that will mark the roadmap of the national industry and companies and AAPP: agentic AI and digital sovereignty.
ASLAN 2026 was a new success for both attendees and sponsors. Furthermore, the organizers can boast of having achieved the participation of the Minister for Digital Transformation and the Public Service, Óscar López, famous for confirming his presence at this type of event only to cancel it a few hours after starting his presentation.
Digital Sovereignty: an imperative for the Government
To see that sovereignty is going to be the recurring theme of the coming months, all it took was to attend the inaugural session offered by the minister. Companies are seeing how the geopolitical context clearly harms the ownership and control over their data and tools, which are mostly hosted. This represents a clear political opportunity for a minister like López who is not known for his special interest in the ICT sector. Sovereignty, however, may be the argument for the minister to finally change his preferences.
During his speech, he stressed that digitalization is no longer a technical option, but a matter of national and European sovereignty. As he noted, “Europe faces the challenge of strengthening its autonomy so as not to depend exclusively on foreign technologies, especially in critical areas such as cloud storage or semiconductor processing. Digital sovereignty is the ability to decide our own technological future. López has just discovered that the world revolves through companies that are not European.
So, now that he knows, he considers that sovereignty must be articulated through the promotion of local data centers and the development of open source software solutions and European standards, something that the national technology sector has been explaining for at least a couple of years. Beyond the populist message, López called to reinforce investment, ensuring that “the Government is investing in the entire digital sovereignty package, from raw materials to the attraction of data centers.” Likewise, he emphasized the need for robust public-private collaboration for Spain to lead the implementation of the 2030 Digital Agenda.
ASLAN 2026 shows the leap to agentic AI
ASLAN 2026 has been marked by growing interest in Agentic AI. In many of the Congress stands, the demonstrations were no longer limited to attendees writing emails or summarizing texts; Now, the “autonomous agents” have the leading role.
These systems, capable of reasoning, planning and executing complex tasks from start to finish, took center stage. For example, it was possible to see how in the field of public administration, an AI agent can autonomously manage the processing of a subsidy, verifying requirements in different databases and notifying the citizen without constant human intervention. For its part, in the business sector, agentic AI is being fundamentally integrated into supply chains to predict stockouts and place automatic orders based on logistics variables in real time.
With all this increase in agents, companies are evolving towards “AI-Ready” infrastructures, so the modernization of networks and the deployment of high-capacity fiber optics are the essential foundations for these algorithms to work with the minimum necessary latency.
Defense in a hyperconnected world
Cybersecurity has been another of the key elements of ASLAN 2026. And in this sense, the key word is cyber resilience. As has been explained in some of the presentations or the companies specialized in cybersecurity present at the Congress have had an impact, the focus is no longer on avoiding intrusion, but on accepting that incidents will occur and that the priority objective is immediate recovery and business continuity.
Likewise, in some of the specialized tables at ASLAN 2026, there has been intense debate on the protection of the “digital workplace”. With the rise of teleworking and hybrid environments, the traditional security perimeter has disappeared, so user identity seems to become one of the pillars on which cybersecurity strategies must be based. In this way. Zero Trust solutions and advanced biometrics have been presented as the key tools to protect access to critical data, regardless of where the employee is located.
Another of the protagonists of ASLAN 2026 in terms of cybersecurity has been the Security Operations Centers (SOC), which are incorporating cognitive capabilities. These next-generation SOCs use AI to analyze trillions of network events per second, identifying attack patterns that would be invisible to the human eye. In this way, for example, the response capacity to a ransomware attack has been reduced from hours to milliseconds, thanks to the automation of network isolation protocols.
Other aspects
ASLAN 2026 has also served to clarify the debate between public and private cloud. As has been talked about for several years, the future is hybrid and multicloud. The biggest change is that companies are choosing to keep their most sensitive data in on-premises private clouds while taking advantage of the scalability of public clouds for less critical applications.
Added to this is the deployment of Edge Computing or edge computing. By processing data close to where it is generated (factories, vehicles, urban sensors), traffic to central data centers is reduced and energy efficiency is improved, a topic that has also had a dedicated space at the fair under the concept of “Sustainable IT.”
Finally, ASLAN 2026 has recognized the most innovative projects of the year in the public sphere, in the 18th call for its Digital Transformation Awards. This event served as a showcase to highlight public-private collaboration to advance a new model of citizen services, closer and more efficient.
At the gala dinner held at the Olivar de la Hinojosa golf course, the fourteen winners of this new call for the leading technological awards in the ICT sector were announced, which has received 84 initiatives from 62 Administrations and public organizations. In total, it is estimated that in its 18 editions more than 220 technological partners and 150 public organizations have been involved.
ASLAN 2026 closed its doors sending a message of technological maturity. Spain is not only adopting technology, but is building a solid ecosystem capable of competing globally. The integration of AI as a structural layer, the commitment to cyber resilience and the determined commitment to digital sovereignty mark the path towards a decade in which digitalization will be the undisputed driver of economic prosperity and social efficiency.
