International Technology Congress 2026
Last year, I took part in the International Technology Congress as a speaker at a session on standardising digital transformation in different fields. This year, my friends from the Digital Leaders of Business Club and I took part in the session “Digital Transformation: The Success Triad — Technology, Security and People”.
Maksim Koropchenko moderated the session. At first, the discussion followed a fairly predictable course:
- I spoke about the digital transformation of the car-rental industry;
- Yury Tsokalo spoke about projects being implemented at Rosatom;
- Stanislav Skalaban spoke about using AI to test hypotheses quickly at Russian Media Group;
- Petr Chernyshev spoke about applying AI and digitally transforming chess tournaments;
- Eldar Mustafin spoke about Rostec’s digital-transformation projects.
As usual, we noted the leading role of people’s engagement, especially that of senior executives, in the success of digital transformation. We also touched briefly on the challenge of defining terms such as mechanisation, automation, IT adoption, digitalisation and digital transformation.
Soon, however, our conversation moved to an entirely new level. We left behind the discussion of specific projects and began reflecting on more abstract matters, including:
- the need for finer distinctions between access layers and areas of responsibility when working with data;
- humanity’s existential identity crisis in the age of AI;
- the need to change the very process of implementing change;
- a consistent focus on a chain of interrelated elements: goal, team, processes, data and technology;
- the value of human interaction and experience-sharing for delivering digital-transformation projects;
- the contraction of digital-transformation projects and higher requirements for their results, including security;
- the paradox between how digital products are perceived in the mass market and in industry.
The time allotted to our session was catastrophically short for discussing every topic, so we continued our conversation in the congress corridors.
I took real intellectual pleasure in discussing such unconventional topics with highly professional experts who are so deeply involved in digital transformation. Special thanks to Maria Mustafaeva for organising the event.
