In 2026, AI no longer sits quietly behind dashboards or chat interfaces. Agentic and multi-agent systems now operate as constant co-workers, managing workflows once owned by humans. Gartner’s research report, Emerging Tech: The Future of Agentic AI in Enterprise Applications, predicts that 40 percent of the enterprise apps will be integrated with task-specific agents by end-2026, up from less than 5 percent currently. This shift marks not just the rise of intelligent software, but the emergence of a new digital society.
For agentic AI to operate safely, at scale, and in the public interest, digital public infrastructure becomes critical. It allows governments to authenticate agents and the systems they act on behalf of. In this world, digital public infrastructure (DPI) will not be a convenience. It will be a lifeline.
Data, power, and sovereignty
As agentic AI emerges as a core driver of decision-making, the critical question is no longer whether governments have data, but whether they can locate it, govern it, and trust it. Sovereignty depends on knowing where data lives, how it is used, and what agents learn from it. A government that cannot verify what its own agents have learned—or with whom they are communicating—is no longer governing.
To survive and thrive in this new ecosystem, DPI must evolve into what we call Digital Shoring. This is the foundation for sovereign, trusted, and open environments built on four pillars: open data with clear lineage, provenance, and governance to ensure trust; open source software that avoids black box dependency; open standards to ensure interoperability across agents and institutions, and open skills to ensure the ability to understand and govern intelligent systems is broadly shared instead of being concentrated among a select few.
Agents as shared institutional capability
Agents can read, analyze, and reason—but the quality of their actions depends entirely on the skills they are equipped with. These skills can be trained, acquired, or—critically—shared.
In public sector contexts, this presents an extraordinary opportunity. Why should every institution reinvent the same agent? Why can’t the skills of a fraud detection agent used in one department be transferred, securely and ethically, to another?
Just like people share their expertise, we need infrastructure for sharing agentic capabilities across digital institutions. Intergovernmental organizations such as the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) continue to promote alignment on digital economy and AI governance principles through initiatives like the APEC Artificial Intelligence Initiative (2026–2030). This thereby enables public institutions to cooperate while respecting national sovereignty.
From “sovereign cloud” to “sovereign AI platforms”
Keeping data within national borders is no longer sufficient. What matters now is where and how models are trained, how they are managed, and how we keep them in check. We need Sovereign AI Platforms to verify credentials, ensure alignment, monitor performance, and enable collaboration.
At Cloudera, we’re developing the scaffolding for such platforms: secure hybrid AI environments, open-source data pipelines, governance-first orchestration layers, and modular LLM serving infrastructure that respects national compliance frameworks. But no company can do this alone. Sovereign AIis a global mission.
Open by design, governed by default
Governments around the world are already realizing that private AI cannot be built on public cloud monopolies. The future must be open by design—in code, in data, in protocols—but governed by default. From Digital IDs that authenticate not only humans, but also agents and their behavior, to full knowledge graphs that maintain shared institutional knowledge across systems, together with audit trails that document every decision, every inference, every prompt. Singapore has begun putting the necessary safeguards in place. In 2025, the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore released an addendum to its AI security guidelines focused specifically on agentic AI, providing practical guidance on identifying risks in autonomous workflows and applying security controls across the AI lifecycle.
This isn’t just about technology. It is about building a new kind of digital society—one designed to empower states, safeguard citizens, and align intelligence with democratic values.
Looking ahead
This transformation will not be easy. It will require bold policy, sustained investment, cross-border cooperation, and—above all—technical leadership grounded in values.
Remus Lim is Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific & Japan at Cloudera.
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Featured image: Google DeepMind on Unsplash
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