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Sovereignty in production: how Wallonia's municipalities built their AI roadmap inside EU rules

BeginnerIntegratorBusinessEnglish25 minutes
Friday, September 25, 2026 · 01:45 PM

"Digital sovereignty" is easy to invoke but hard to operationalize, especially once AI enters the stack. This talk walks through how iMio turned sovereignty from a political talking point into a set of concrete, auditable decisions: which EU regulations actually constrain a municipal IT cooperative (GDPR, the AI Act's obligations for public-sector deployers, public procurement law), and how those constraints shaped real choices — where AI models run, what data leaves iMio's control and under what jurisdiction, how vendor lock-in risk was weighed against delivery speed, and where iMio chose to build rather than buy.

Details

iMio is a public IT cooperative serving 460 municipalities in Wallonia, Belgium, running a dozen SaaS software from permit management to council deliberation, and generative AI tools built for civil servants and citizens.

Using iMio's AI projects (Omnia Chat, Omnia Lex) as concrete case studies, this talk shows the tradeoffs made in public: what sovereignty cost in time and complexity, what it didn't cost. The goal isn't to sell a model of sovereignty — it's to give other public-sector users a working checklist for making the same calls under the same regulatory pressure.

What attendees take away

  • The regulations that actually constrain a public-sector deployer — GDPR, the AI Act's obligations for public-sector deployers, and public procurement law; which of them bind a municipal IT cooperative in practice, and how each shaped a real decision.
  • Build-or-buy with the reasoning shown — how vendor lock-in risk was weighed against delivery speed, and where iMio chose to build rather than buy.
  • Two AI case studies in production — Omnia Chat and Omnia Lex: where the models run, what data leaves iMio's control, and under what jurisdiction.
  • What sovereignty cost, and what it didn't — the time and complexity accounted for openly, against the choices that came at no cost.
  • A working checklist — for public-sector users making the same calls under the same regulatory pressure.