Digital sovereignty has become a board-level concern for 93% of the large organizations surveyed by the Capgemini Research Institute, but most executives do not believe complete technological independence is realistic. The findings, released Tuesday, Sept. 8, point toward a more practical priority for business leaders: understanding critical dependencies and preparing to operate when a major provider, region or supply chain becomes unavailable.
The study surveyed 1,300 business and technology executives in April across the United States, the United Kingdom, continental Europe and Asia-Pacific. Respondents worked at companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue or government departments with budgets above $1 billion. The results describe that population; they should not be treated as a measure of every business.
Executives are choosing resilience over independence
Capgemini found that 59% of respondents consider full digital sovereignty unrealistic. Two-thirds defined the goal as “resilient interdependence”—selective control of critical technologies combined with outside partnerships—rather than ownership of every component in the stack. More than half said they believe sovereignty can be strengthened without sacrificing competitiveness.
That distinction matters. Modern companies depend on global cloud platforms, semiconductor supply chains, software ecosystems, open-source projects and specialist vendors. Replacing all of them with internally owned alternatives would be prohibitively expensive and could isolate the organization from innovation. Resilience asks a different question: Which dependencies could stop the business, and what control is necessary to manage them?
AI is an especially important test. Three-quarters of respondents identified it as a priority area for sovereignty efforts. A model provider can influence cost, data handling, available features and the pace at which a deployed workflow changes. If an organization cannot identify where models run, what data they receive and how a workload could move, an AI strategy can become a continuity risk disguised as a software purchase.
Visibility is the weakest control
Only 14% of organizations reported end-to-end visibility into dependencies across their broader technology ecosystems. More than one-third said moving away from a critical provider would take longer than a year, while one in 10 reported having no viable alternative. Those numbers expose the gap between a board discussion and an operating capability.
Vendor inventories alone will not close it. Leaders need to map dependencies to business services: revenue collection, customer authentication, order processing, product delivery, regulatory reporting and internal communications. The meaningful unit is not the application. It is the business outcome that fails when the application or one of its upstream providers stops working.
The report also found uneven contingency planning. Among organizations that had recently experienced operational disruptions, 42% had plans in place. Preparedness was higher in the United States than in Europe or Asia-Pacific. Capgemini’s research further indicated that 86% of 866 organizations included in a separate sovereignty index had significant exposure to foreign or externally controlled supply chains.
Boards need an exit design, not an exit promise
A credible exit plan specifies data formats, replacement providers, contractual rights, migration time, responsible executives and the level of service the company can maintain during a transition. It must be tested. A clause saying data is portable provides little protection if extraction takes months, proprietary workflows must be rebuilt or employees do not know how to operate the alternative.
Cost remains a constraint. Fewer than half of respondents said they would pay a premium for greater sovereignty; among those willing to pay, the average premium was 23%. That creates a capital-allocation problem. Organizations cannot apply the most expensive controls everywhere. They must identify the services whose failure would create the greatest financial, regulatory or customer damage.
That prioritization belongs in continuity planning and investment reviews, not only in technology procurement. Finance leaders can require a dependency assessment for critical systems, while operating teams define acceptable downtime and minimum service levels. The result is a clearer basis for deciding where redundancy, portability or a second supplier is worth paying for now.
Independent coverage of the findings emphasized preparations for digital infrastructure shocks, while Capgemini’s release framed sovereignty as managed dependence. That is the useful executive takeaway. The objective is not technological isolation. It is the ability to see dependencies, make deliberate trade-offs and keep the business functioning when a relationship or platform changes unexpectedly.