The most pressing challenges of our time share one essential trait: they are systemic. They do not manifest themselves in isolation, but emerge as networks of interdependencies that cut across sectors, geographies and disciplines. Climate change is intertwined with geopolitical tensions, migrations are linked to economic transformations, pandemics lay bare the fragility of global value chains. In this scenario, three dimensions assume a strategic role due to their transformative impact: artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and sustainability.
This was also discussed yesterday at an important meeting organised by Teleconsys, a long-standing partner of the Foundation for Digital Sustainability: the Secure Innovation Summit 2025, in which I had the pleasure of participating and attempting to bring – precisely – a system view on these three areas.
Areas that are not separate, but represent interconnected ecosystems that require integrated governance.
In smart cities, for example, IoT sensors collect personal data feeding algorithms that optimise energy consumption and risk discriminating against the digitally excluded. In healthcare systems, diagnostic algorithms process sensitive data promising more effective treatments, but centralise decision-making power and imply environmental costs for computational infrastructure. To ignore one dimension is to undermine the overall balance, generating systemic vulnerabilities that transcend individual domains. Sustainability is this: intersystemic balancing.
In this context, we can no longer afford disciplinary silos. The complexity of digital transformation demands an ecosystem approach, capable of recognising interdependencies and governing the tensions between efficiency, protection and responsibility. Only through this integrated vision can we design technological systems that are both high-performance, secure and sustainable.
Digital sustainability: from constraint to value
Digital sustainability is not a green paint job applied to technology, but a redefinition of its very meaning. A technology is sustainable if it generates fair, affordable and lasting value throughout its life cycle. This involves designing to include, assessing impacts from conception to decommissioning, and integrating sustainability into design criteria.
The change calls for a cultural shift: sustainability is not an external constraint, but an intrinsic value, guiding the choice of partners, the governance of data, the entire design of solutions.
Understood in this way, it becomes a criterion of quality, not an obstacle to innovation: an enabling factor of resilience, legitimacy and inclusion.
Sustainable cybersecurity: protecting people, not just infrastructure
Traditional cybersecurity protects people through systems. Sustainable security, on the other hand, starts with people: it considers them as active subjects, holders of rights and needs, and builds infrastructures around them that are fair, transparent and accessible. This implies transparency, because citizens must know how and by whom their data are protected; accessibility, because security must not turn into a barrier to digital entry; and proportionality, because the measures taken must be balanced with respect for fundamental rights.
Integrating the principle of security by design with that of sustainability by design means creating secure and just systems. Two complementary approaches that make technologies legitimate, accessible and resilient. Security that is blind to rights, that excludes the most fragile or opaques processes, defends infrastructure but abandons people.
On the contrary, sustainable cybersecurity enhances trust and stabilises systems; while security enables conditions for lasting and inclusive innovations.
Responsible AI: governing systemic transformation
AI is not just a technology: it is a transformative force that profoundly affects the environment, economy and society. Its connections with sustainability are multiple and far from theoretical: they concern the way energy is consumed, the way economic power is redistributed and, above all, the impact on rights and social cohesion. On the environmental level, training models consume increasing resources, but can also generate optimisation if designed with efficiency in mind. On the economic level, the dynamics of power concentration require open architectures and inclusive rules. On the social level, the use of AI in decision-making processes must be transparent, contestable and regulated.
Precisely in order to reflect on these interconnections and stimulate an informed debate, the Foundation for Digital Sustainability has promoted the‘Manifesto for the Digital Sustainability of AI‘: an initiative proposing principles and tools to steer the development of artificial intelligence towards the common good.
Integrated governance: beyond disciplinary silos
An analysis of the binary relationships between security and sustainability or AI and sustainability shows significant interdependencies. But only by looking at the three elements together does the full picture reveal itself.
A powerful but unsafe AI is vulnerable: it can be manipulated to reinforce discrimination.
Cybersecurity that is insensitive to sustainability can exclude entire sections of society. Technology-insensitive sustainability remains sterile and theoretical.
Governing technology today means managing this triangular complexity, knowing how to read systemic impacts, build bridges between knowledge, mediate between values in tension. A new model of governance is needed: participatory, transparent, based on integrated sustainability and capable of transforming risk into a design lever, thanks to a continuous cycle of evaluation and adaptation.
Fundamental is the issue of skills: no longer just technical, but hybrid. We need figures capable of interpreting standards, translating languages, building trust. Professionals capable of balancing security and inclusion, innovation and transparency, in a systemic vision that brings together AI, cybersecurity and sustainability.
Towards a technology of meaning
At root, it all comes down to one question: do we want technologies that simply work or technologies that generate value for society? Efficient AI can amplify inequalities, consume resources, opacify rights. Or, if oriented towards the common good, it can become a lever for equitable and sustainable change. Similarly, a cybersecurity designed only as a technical defence can stiffen systems and marginalise those without access to digital skills or resources. But if designed in a sustainable way, it can become a tool for inclusion, protection of rights and strengthening of collective trust.
Meaningful technology stems precisely from this integration: a powerful, secure and sustainable AI; cybersecurity that defends people as well as systems; sustainability that does not hold back innovation but is a condition of it.
It is in the simultaneous consideration of these three elements – AI, cybersecurity and sustainability – that the true added value of a systemic vision is unleashed. It is no longer a matter of coupling two domains according to need, but of recognising that only their three-dimensional interaction makes it possible to address contemporary challenges fairly, effectively and sustainably. As in a system of equations with three variables, meaning only emerges when considering the whole: any attempt to isolate or simplify compromises the balance, because it is in the dynamic interweaving of protection, innovation and responsibility that a technology truly capable of generating shared value is built. This is not a remote possibility, but a concrete responsibility. It is not enough to govern technology: it must be directed. Make sense of the choices. And choose with courage, vision and awareness.
