Tech Sovereignty

What it means, why it matters, how to achieve it

Context
Every tool you use, from your cloud and your AI model to your email and your payments, is part of a stack. And every stack is a chain of dependencies you have accepted, often without noticing. Do you actually know what you depend on, and who is on the other end?

Those providers hold real power over you. They can change the rules, raise the price, or cut your access overnight. They act on their own interests and under the laws of their own countries, which may not align with yours. And your data may be accessible to them, or to the governments they answer to, in ways you cannot fully see or control.

That is what tech sovereignty is about: not building everything yourself, but knowing what you depend on and keeping the power to choose. How can it be achieved? This panel goes beyond "local good, foreign bad" to explore practical options at the regional, national, organizational and individual levels, and the real costs and tradeoffs that come with them.

Recommended for: founders, business leaders, engineers, public-sector professionals, and anyone who wants to think more clearly about the technology choices they make.

Technological Sovereignty is the ability to access the technologies you consider critical, and to freely choose your own solutions, without one-sided dependency.<br>

Event Overview

Date: October 9th, 2026
Time: Opening 10:00, Panel 10:30-11:30
Venue: CIC Fukuoka, One Building Fukuoka, 7th floor (see on Google maps)
Language: English
Fee: Free

Program

10:00 - 10:30 Venue Opening & Entry
10:30 - 11:30 Panel Discussion Start
11:30 - 12:00 Closure & Casual Discussion

Speakers

• Alice BALLÉ - Ekohe (moderator). Alice leads brand and communication strategy at Ekohe, an independent AI company working across Japan, China, France, the United States and Canada. Model-agnostic and cloud-agnostic by design for the last 19 years, Ekohe helps organizations integrate AI without locking them into a single provider. Alice connects the strategic, business and societal sides of technology choices.
• Adam CURNOW - KarasuSec, IT & security. Adam is the founder of KarasuSec, which helps growing startups build secure, scalable and compliant IT foundations, from cloud infrastructure and identity management to security and compliance readiness. With more than 10 years in IT operations and cybersecurity across Ireland and the Netherlands, including as the first dedicated IT hire and later IT & Cyber Security Lead at a logistics tech scale-up, he brings the view from the systems themselves: where dependencies create risk, and what it takes for organizations to stay resilient.
• Roland HALLER - CrabNebula/Comply.Land, Tech Compliance. Based in Fukuoka, Roland works on Comply.Land, CrabNebula's platform helping hardware, software and connected-device makers comply with the EU Cyber Resilience Act and access the European market. He brings a perspective on how regulation and cross-border requirements shape the technologies we can build, sell and rely on.

Organized by Ekohe & La French Tech Tokyo
Contact: alice.balle@ekohe.com