The AI Risk Is Real. The Solution Was Already In The Room.

The European Identity and Cloud Conference in Berlin May 19 - May 24 is a key gathering of experts, firms and suppliers in the space.

While the EU countries are preparing to roll out the EU Wallet to Europeans in every country, to be offered in 2027, worries are arising about the use of Artificial Intelligences in digital infrastructures. The main topics of the conference are:

• Digital Identity
• Artificial Intelligence and the use of generative agents
• Identity and Access Management

To our surprise, the deployment of a truly decentralised digital identity with the EU Wallet is not fully understood. The benefits are huge; it’s about real protection against cyberattack with more secured IDs, cost benefits, true interoperability and customer satisfaction. In short, it’s about mutual trust that is also effective.

Still, the conference doesn´t fully grasp this:

Most vendor are not fully aware about the digital revolution that the EU Wallet brings about. Several suppliers of IAM services does not have a plan on how the to handle that the EU Wallet will force changes for their offering. Some of them are not even fully aware of the EU Wallet and that this identity framework will replace the unsecure single-sign on paradigm.

On the other side, huge attention is brought about on the risks of the expanding use of AI. The ethics and the compliance issues with the use of autonomous agents that can act with a predefined set of actions are serious challenges.

It appears to us that the EU wallet and the further EU Business Wallet will together, allow a controlled and lower risk use of AI agent. This requires a policy guidance and that the identity of the initiator of the agents is clearly defined and not possible to tamper in the digital ecosystem defined by the EUID Wallet.

The eIDAS2 legislation and EU Wallet are solving the main concerns firms will have with the use of AI agents. Artificial Intelligence needs SSI (Self-Sovereign Identity).

Another feature of the conference, is the rising recognition that Identity is the weak chain in the defence against Cybercrime.

But instead of truly understanding and promoting the fully end-to-end encryption embedded in the EU Wallet and the significant improvement in security, several vendors and consultants promote a much more complex set of approaches, like the concept of Identity Fabrics, involving complexes elements that as a whole is deemed to deliver what company should be doing to protect their infrastructure.

However, firms should simplify their priority action, first understand the benefits of EU Wallet as the main tool to defend against cybercrime, and then implement the IDs in business processes. If a firm delivers on a full use case, where transactions chains are fully based on the EU Wallets, it will quickly realise the benefits.