Insights from Jon Shamah: A Global Perspective on Digital Identity and Transformation

IWM Duxford is an extraordinary aviation museum situated on a genuine historic Cambridgeshire airfield that witnessed crucial events from the First World War onwards. The expansive site displays an impressive array of preserved military buildings alongside vast exhibition halls featuring legendary aircraft like the Supermarine Spitfire, Concorde 101, and the SR-71 Blackbird. Visitors can explore t...

Digital retail has evolved from early expectations of centralized online department stores into a system shaped by shipping economics, where e-commerce excels in areas like bulk family groceries and niche specialist brands. While modern comparison platforms give the appearance of searching open markets, they actually operate as controlled environments driven by hidden algorithms, supplier fees, an...

Modern society increasingly relies on complex connected systems, raising fundamental questions about how trust can be established and maintained when technology becomes too intricate for any single person to fully comprehend. To ensure dependability, organizations must look beyond mere documentation and instead focus on practical reliability, meaningful transparency, and layered governance that sh...

Digital wallets have lost their initial grand vision as European teams become bogged down in the complex mechanics of technical delivery and regulatory compliance. If these applications merely store official documents, they will fail to revolutionise user experience and instead remain ordinary software. The true potential lies in empowering individuals with portable credentials, enhanced privacy,...

Artificial intelligence has become the latest technology to attract apocalyptic headlines. We are told that AI will take every job, destroy democracy, make independent thought impossible, or even threaten humanity itself. Some of these concerns deserve serious attention. Others resemble earlier technology panics around the internet, eCommerce, cloud computing and digital identity: important transi...

In the digital age, determining truth is no longer simply a matter of finding information. We live in a world where vast amounts of content are created, shared, and consumed every second, making it essential to evaluate both the information itself and the technologies that deliver it. Truth-seeking therefore requires a combination of critical thinking, information literacy, and digital literacy.

When resilience is discussed today, the conversation almost inevitably turns to cyber resilience. Organisations are investing heavily in protecting systems, securing networks, managing incidents, and ensuring continuity in the face of increasingly sophisticated threats. This focus is entirely appropriate. Resilience should be considered from the earliest stages of system design, not added as an af...

Modern government depends on technology. Digital systems administer benefits, protect borders, detect fraud, manage public health, support policing and help agencies respond to emergencies. Used lawfully and proportionately, these tools can make the state more efficient and accessible. The danger arises when technical capability becomes a substitute for democratic justification. A system may be ab...

The digital environment is moving from a world of software tools to a world of software actors. Traditional applications wait for a person to issue a command. Increasingly, artificial intelligence systems can interpret a goal, select tools, exchange information, initiate transactions and produce outputs with limited human intervention. Some will remain tightly controlled assistants. Others will op...

Trust is not a universal constant. It varies in degree, meaning and operational consequence across environments, countries, legal systems, institutions and cultures. In international settings, this variation matters because the same word—trust—may refer to legal recognition, technical reliability, institutional confidence, cultural familiarity, commercial risk tolerance, evidential assurance, or p...

One of the most significant challenges of the digital age is determining who owns information, defining the practical scope of privacy, and enabling individuals to make informed decisions about their data. As technology becomes increasingly embedded in everyday life, the distinctions among privacy, anonymity, and publicly available information can no longer be treated as matters of abstract academ...

The public conversation about artificial intelligence is shaped as much by language as by technology. The term “AI” is now used for everything from chat assistants and image generators to fraud alerts, automated emails and simple rule-based processes. For many people, the experience looks the same: a computer carries out a task that once needed a person. It is easy to see why AI and automation are...

Europe is heading into an important period for digital wallets, although how quickly people adopt them depends on what we mean by a “wallet”. Payment wallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal are already part of everyday life in many markets. Identity wallets, which can hold official credentials, prove personal details and support electronic signatures, are only now moving beyond trials and...

A visual identity card or a mobile credential remain useful evidence in face-to-face settings, but they are not, by themselves, complete verification mechanisms. For routine and low-risk interactions, a trained person may reasonably inspect a card or phone image, compare the portrait with the presenter and check obvious security features. As transaction value, legal consequence or fraud exposure i...

Examining the contemporary crisis of digital trust caused by the rapid proliferation of automated bots and synthetic media. It is argued that the current "assume-validity" model of information, which worked for physical signatures, fails in a digital landscape where viral misinformation causes immediate and irreversible harm. To solve this, the it is suggested to look back at historical trust mode...

Exploring the evolution of digital commerce, contrasting early internet predictions with the current reality of algorithm-driven marketplaces. While consumers often believe comparison websites offer neutral guidance, the source reveals these platforms frequently prioritise corporate profit and supplier fees over genuine user needs. Introduces the concept of autonomous customer agents as a potentia...

Discussing the emergence of swarm attacks, a strategic threat where multiple low-cost disruptions are coordinated to overwhelm distributed infrastructure. Rather than a single massive strike, these campaigns use a combination of digital interference, physical tampering, and misinformation to exhaust an organisation’s defences. Emphasising that modern resilience requires shifting focus from total p...

This episode discusses the rapid integration of artificial intelligence within modern business operations, highlighting how automation can enhance efficiency and strategic growth. While small and medium-sized enterprises benefit from lowered costs and streamlined processes, there is a growing over-reliance on unmoderated algorithms. This dependency risks a loss of institutional knowledge and human...

 This webinar outlines the critical necessity of interoperability within digital identity systems to overcome the inefficiencies of fragmented national frameworks. It highlights how the transition to eIDAS 2.0 establishes a unified legal and technical basis for cross-border authentication, ensuring that digital signatures and identity wallets carry equal legal weight across different jurisdictions...

Looking forward to the next generation of digital wallets is always tricky. We have become accustomed to thinking of the European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet primarily as a carrier of official credentials and as a mechanism for tightly scoped, bilateral interactions. Beyond these familiar patterns however, the conceptual horizon remains surprisingly constrained. A next generation of digital wal...

Agentic AI—artificial intelligence systems capable of acting on behalf of individuals with a degree of autonomy—holds particularly significant promise for segments of the population that have struggled to benefit from previous waves of digital innovation. For many people, technological progress has not translated into empowerment but into growing complexity, confusion, and exclusion. If agentic AI...

The first question any agent must answer is simply “Who are you?” But this is not a trivial inquiry. For an AI‑based agent, establishing identity requires more than a label or a model ID. It requires a resolvable, unique identifier that allows relying parties to cryptographically verify which specific agent instance they are interacting with; it also requires a clear statement of the ultimate bene...

In the real, non-comic strip world, offering ‘Trust’ does not ensure that matters will not go wrong, it highlights that those who profess as being ‘trustworthy’ have to backup the proposition with risk mitigation and liability acceptance when things do. So, in this digital ecosystem, whether you are a ‘Trustworthy Source’, a ‘Qualified Trust Service Provider’ (QTSP in eIDAS2) or just digitally sig...

There is a technological transition in digital identity management, specifically the shift from physical hardware to cloud-based environments. While traditional on-premises systems offered robust security, they were often hindered by high maintenance costs and limited scalability. Modern remote secure element (RSE) technology now allows organisations to maintain high levels of trust and eIDAS 2.0...

The EUDI Wallet revolutionises EU academia by providing a secure, user-controlled platform for digital credentials. It enables seamless cross-border mobility, replaces paper-based diplomas with verified attestations, and streamlines Erasmus applications and university access.