Empowered Communities

The Empowered Communities theme has evolved beyond the 2025 focus on ensuring access to digital technologies. While digital skills already featured in DET 2025, as highlighted by the trend Building Digital Skills and Continuous Learning, their importance has become much more prominent. In this edition, the skills dimension is embedded across multiple trends and the overall theme places greater emphasis on equipping people with the skills, resources, and capacity to actively use, shape, and create digital value. In the digital economy of 2026, empowerment requires not only access but also agency — the knowledge, confidence, and ability to make informed choices, influence outcomes, and create value in the digital world.

Access to opportunities through digital learning, financial participation, and entrepreneurship has evolved to include resilience and adaptation to the material impacts of digital technologies. This is particularly visible in the labor market, where generative AI is reshaping jobs, displacing tasks, and transforming career pathways. Continuous digital touchpoints are driving more personalized products and services, leading to new opportunities for interaction within physical-digital hybrid environments. At the same time, as technology becomes ever more woven into our daily lives, there is growing recognition that it is also impacting wellbeing and health aspects.

The next phase of empowerment will be shaped by deeper equity and ethical challenges. The widening global AI divide is a central concern: disparities in access to AI infrastructure, data, and expertise are amplifying inequality between nations, organizations, and communities. Advances in neurotechnology and brain–computer interfaces are blurring the boundaries between humans and machines. While these advances create new opportunities, they also intensify concerns about data privacy, algorithmic fairness, and the governance of systems that increasingly shape everyday life.