Every start of the year brings with it an unavoidable exercise: looking ahead without forgetting what we have learnt. The year 2026 opens in a context in which digital transformation is no longer a future promise or threat, but a structural condition of our present. It is against this backdrop that I would like to wish a Happy New Year to those who, in various capacities, work with us every day to understand, govern and guide the relationship between digital technologies, the economy and society. Not with the illusion of controlling change, but with the responsibility not to undergo it.
Corporate Digital Responsibility? Yes, but how to
In the course of 2025, especially in Germany, people began to talk in an increasingly structured manner about digital corporate responsibility as a separate category from traditional social responsibility. The topic emerged in the public and industry debate not as an ethical issue in an abstract sense, but as a response to a fact that is now difficult to dispute: digital transformation has ceased to be a purely technical factor. In parallel, reflection in France has also focused on the role of business in managing the consequences of advanced digitisation, particularly when platforms, algorithms and automated systems directly affect individual behaviour and the functioning of markets.
It is precisely from this point, however, that a distinction needs to be made. The way in which digital responsibility has been addressed in the European debate has had the merit of shifting the focus beyond the technological dimension, but still tends to place the problem downstream of transformation processes. Accountability is called into question when the effects of digital are already visible: on labour, on inequalities, on the distribution of decision-making power, on the transparency of automated systems.
This is an important but not decisive step. Indeed, focusing exclusively on responsibility runs the risk of confining the debate to the effects without fully questioning the directions. In other words, the debate is about who should be held accountable for the consequences of digital without really questioning the transformation model that those consequences make probable. As if it were enough to identify a culprit a posteriori in order to avoid questioning choices that, upstream, no one had the courage to govern.
Herein lies the need for a different perspective. A perspective that does not deny the centrality of digital responsibility, but relocates it within a broader framework, in which digital is not only seen as a source of risks to be mitigated, but as a structural factor of sustainability or unsustainability of economic and social systems. In this framework, responsibility ceases to be the end point of reasoning and becomes an operational lever within a broader design.
The central question, then, is not only how to respond to the effects produced by the digital transformation, but how to direct that transformation before the effects become consolidated. It is from this shift in outlook – from outcomes to trajectories – that the need for reflection develops.
Digital responsibility is not a variant of CSR
A still widespread misunderstanding consists in bringing digital responsibility within the established practices of Corporate Social Responsibility. It is an understandable assimilation, but conceptually fragile: a bit like thinking that it is enough to add a page on paper recycling to the sustainability report to compensate for a digital strategy that, in the meantime, automates decisions without knowing who really makes them. CSR was created to compensate or mitigate the impacts of an economic activity that remains essentially unchanged in its structure. Digital transformation, on the contrary, affects the very structure of business activity: it redefines decision-making processes, alters information asymmetries, and changes the relationship between automation and human responsibility. This is why, for years, we have been talking about digital sustainability as a systemic element.
From this perspective, digital responsibility is not about what the company adds to its activities, but what it produces indirectly through the use of digital technologies. It is not measured on the declared intentions, but on the systemic effects that those technologies generate over time: a bit like discovering, with sincere amazement, that the autopilot has taken the car off the road after deciding to sleep in the back seat, only to then wonder not so much how to keep the car on track, but who should pay for the tow truck.
From digitisation to transformation
The distinction between digitisation and digital transformation, a central theme in Digital Sustainability: why sustainability cannot do without digital transformation, is decisive.
Digitalisation intervenes on processes, improving their efficiency. Digital transformation intervenes on the meaning of decisions: it changes the way in which one evaluates, selects, assigns value.
Digital responsibility emerges when technology stops merely supporting decision-making and begins to guide it; when it does not merely execute, but suggests; when it does not merely record the past, but helps to shape the future. At this stage, digital is no longer merely a productive factor. It becomes a systemic context.
Why responsibility cannot be delegated to technology
The idea that accountability can be embedded in algorithms, through systems defined as ‘ethical’, ‘impartial’ or ‘accountable by design’ keeps resurfacing in the public debate. This is a reassuring representation, but deeply misleading.
Algorithms, as I explain in my latest book ‘The Theatre of Thinking Machines: 10 False Myths about AI and How to Overcome Them‘, are not moral subjects: they do not have intentionality, they do not make decisions in the human sense of the term, and they cannot answer for the consequences of their operations.
To attribute responsibility to technology is, in effect, to take it away from the organisation that designs, trains and uses it. Digital responsibility is always human and organisational. It concerns the design choices, the contexts of use, the criteria by which outcomes are evaluated. There is no responsibility of the algorithm. There is a responsibility of the person who decides to give it a role.
Beyond risk management
In recent years, digital responsibility has often been approached in terms of risk: cyber security, data protection, regulatory compliance. All necessary elements, but not sufficient. Digital does not only produce risks that need to be contained. It produces profound transformations in the way people work, choose, understand reality.
A technology can be perfectly compliant with standards and, at the same time, incentivise dysfunctional behaviour, accentuate inequalities, reduce critical capacity or shift decision-making control opaquely. Failure to consider this is like a company obsessively worrying about having compliant fire extinguishers in every room, only to continue piling up petrol in the corridors while explaining, with a satisfied air, that after all, the important thing is to be ready when the fire breaks out. Digital responsibility begins where compliance ends: in the governance of impacts, not in the simple prevention of damage.
Responsibility as a capacity for orientation
Reasoning in terms of digital responsibility means recognising that digital hardly ever imposes an outcome, but modifies probabilities. It makes some behaviours more frequent, some choices more convenient, some trajectories more likely than others.
Governing digital means questioning not only what is technically possible, but what becomes systematically normal. In this sense, digital responsibility is not a constraint external to the enterprise, but a strategic competence: the ability to steer transformation rather than undergo it, to maintain human control over increasingly automated decision-making processes.
The line for 2026
In 2026 we will have to continue to think about these issues in greater depth and with a change of posture that can no longer be postponed. Digital responsibility cannot remain a side issue, evoked only in the presence of critical situations. It must become a mainstay, a lens through which research, training, policy analysis and field experimentation can be read. Not as a tool for mitigation, but as a lever to guide innovation.
This means strengthening the observation and measurement capacity that the Foundation started five years ago with theDigital Sustainability Observatory, to understand not only the impacts of digital, but the degree of awareness with which people, companies and organisations govern emerging technologies. It means translating the analysis into application tools such as the Reference Practices on which the Foundation has worked and is working with UNI, the Italian Standards Organisation, capable of accompanying strategic decisions beyond the logic of compliance. It means investing in training able to recognise the systemic impacts of technologies and to maintain conscious human control in automated choices, and on this we will have much to do with the Academy that, in the coming weeks, will become accessible to members and partners.
It also means taking on a more explicit role in the dialogue with institutions, contributing to the ex ante evaluation of the effects of digital policies on inequalities, access to opportunities and the cohesion of economic systems: a work that began with The States General of Digital Sustainability and that has developed into an ongoing dialogue with institutions and politics. It means opening spaces for concrete experimentation, in territories and supply chains, to test digital transformation models oriented towards inclusion, equity and accountability. And this has led us to develop a programme such as Digital4Aid, which through charity initiatives experiments with ways of making digital responsibility a concrete action.
The course for our 2026 is clear: consolidate the shift from support in risk governance to trajectory governance. From effects management to intentional modelling of digital futures. It is in this ability to transform responsibility into widespread competence that the maturity of our relationship with digital will be played out over the coming years. And it is on this challenge that, today, it is worth wishing a Happy New Year.
