The third annual Prague GeoTech Summit ran in parallel with the 21st GLOBSEC Forum in Prague from 21 to 23 May 2026, drawing more than 2,000 participants from nearly 80 countries under the auspices of Czech President Petr Pavel. The Forum’s headline theme — “The Global Systemic Transformation” — framed the conversation around fragmentation, power competition, and accelerating risk, but the deeper current running beneath nearly every session was technology. From the war in Ukraine, where drones, AI, and scaled defence production have made Kyiv a security provider to Europe rather than merely a recipient of its assistance, to the Iran-US-Israel conflict, to the contest for industrial leadership across the Indo-Pacific, the through-line was the same: technology is now the terrain on which sovereignty, security, and competitiveness are being decided. That is precisely the terrain the GeoTech Center, under the direction of General John R. Allen, works on every day.
The Center’s footprint across the three days was extensive. The Summit opened with a fireside conversation between President Pavel and General Allen on Europe in the intelligent age, exploring what the continent must get right to remain a sovereign and competitive actor in a decade when technological capability will define geopolitical influence. A main-stage panel that followed — “Europe’s Tech Power Gap: Can the Continent Finally Scale?“, led by General Allen — assessed progress against the Draghi Report with Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen, Dutch Minister Willemijn Aerdts, Microsoft’s Lisa Monaco, and Saab CEO Micael Johansson, drawing on the Center’s GeoTech Tech Uptake Tracker, which maps AI diffusion across the EU-27 and exposes the structural levers — connectivity, digital skills, cloud compute, and venture capital — where Europe will win or lose. A private lunch hosted by General Allen with President Pavel, EVP Virkkunen, and fifteen C-suite technology leaders pressed into the harder questions beneath the application layer: compute, energy, capital, talent, and the cyber resilience that has to underwrite them.
The Center anchored two GeoTech side sessions on Day 2 — “When Infrastructure Becomes a Battlefield: The Age of Infrastructure Warfare” and “From Scrap to Shield: Innovative Levers to Break Europe’s Material Dependencies” — and General Allen moderated a Palo Networks fireside chat on Europe’s cyber race in the age of frontier AI featuring a conversation with Helmut Reisinger regarding Anthropic’s Mythos and Project Glasswing. A working dinner on defence digitalisation, also moderated by General Allen, closed the second day, examining what it takes to move interoperability from frameworks to the frontline.
Across all those engagements, the Center convened bilateral meetings with the senior leadership of AWS, Google, Microsoft, Oshkosh, Exiger, GE Vernova, Anduril, and Schneider Electric — the operating layer of the transatlantic technology architecture — and held its GeoTech Advisors Breakfast with former Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid, French General Philippe Lavigne, MEP Eva Maydell. Also in attendance at the breakfast were the Center’s Fellows, including Ambassador Stefan Lindstrum, former Finland’s Tech Ambassador and currently a consul in Houston, Alena Kudzko from Microsoft, Luís Viegas Cardoso, a former policy adviser at the President von der Leyen’s Advisory Service (I.D.E.A.) at the European Commission, and Koray Kose from Kose Advisory.
Andrea Pahon, the Center’s Deputy Director; and Diana Ondrejkovičová were deeply involved throughout the run-up to the Forum and Summit and were central to the planning and execution of the three-day summit.
The Forum offered the stage, but the substance — adoption, diffusion, sovereignty, resilience, and the industrial conversion of strategy into capability — is the work of the GeoTech Center, and the Prague gathering made that integration visible.