CEE Her Roundtable: Who Builds Resilience? AI, Technology and Europe’s Societal Capacity 

Thursday, 10 September 2026 

Description  

Societal resilience, the capacity of a society to anticipate disturbance, absorb it without losing its core functions, and adapt or reorganise once it has passed, has moved to the centre of European policy. It cannot be produced by government alone. It is distributed across public institutions, private operators, civil society and citizens, and rests on a population that is prepared rather than merely protected. 

AI and digital technologies occupy an uncertain place in this account. They are treated for the most part as sources of risk, yet the same technologies extend a society’s capacity to anticipate crises, sustain essential functions under strain, coordinate collective response and hold institutions to account. Whether they reinforce resilience or erode it depends less on the tools themselves than on how, by whom and under what conditions they are used, and in Central and Eastern Europe that capacity is distributed unevenly. into the same room around a single question: how can AI and new technologies build enduring societal resilience in CEE and across Europe? 

Key Questions 

• The information space: how can AI tools strengthen the integrity of public debate, and what is the role of regulation, public-private coordination and education? 

• Democratic innovation: how can new technologies accelerate and scale democratic innovation, and how is it kept inclusive across region, age and gender? 

• The economy and the future of work: as AI separates firms, workers and regions by their capacity to adopt it, what closes that gap rather than widening it? 

• Infrastructure and crisis continuity: what keeps essential digital services running during disruption, and where are the coordination gaps between public and private operators? 

  Speakers:   

Led by: Monika Kočiová, Expert on public-private dialogue and business environment reform