For years, we've described digital transformation as a path to efficiency: automating tasks, reducing time, eliminating errors, integrating systems.
This narrative has accompanied the evolution of software platforms and continues to generate value. The arrival of artificial intelligence agents, however, ushers in a different kind of change.
We're not simply automating tasks: we're introducing new individuals capable of observing a context, processing information, and making operational decisions similarly to a human, but with incomparably greater speed and processing power.
It's as if, within an organization, we suddenly added hundreds of new collaborators capable of working simultaneously and at a speed unthinkable for a single person.
This shift shifts the focus from simple automation to process governance. The question is no longer just how to automate a task, but how to govern those who perform that task, defining their roles, responsibilities, limits, and methods of coordination with the rest of the organization.
This is where the concept of operational sovereignty has its roots : an organization's ability to maintain control over how work gets done, regardless of whether it is done by people, software , or AI agents.
From procedure to autonomy
Traditional software executes instructions. Agents, on the other hand, interpret goals.
The difference is substantial. A traditional process produces the same result every time it receives the same data. An agent works probabilistically: it evaluates information, constructs a reasoning, and chooses the most suitable path to achieve a goal. It is precisely this autonomy that makes it useful, but also requires new forms of governance. For this reason, it becomes reductive to consider an agent as a simple technological component.
From an organizational perspective, an agent is much more like a new employee than a new piece of software. It requires access to specific information, operates within defined responsibilities, produces verifiable results, generates costs that must be measured, and makes decisions that must be traceable and reconstructable. The questions an organization must ask itself are strikingly similar to those it asks when adding a new person to a process.
- What data can you access?
- What decisions can you make?
- How can I reconstruct the path that led to a decision?
- How do I measure the quality of his work?
- Who answers when something goes wrong?
The value of processes changes
When it comes to digital sovereignty, the debate often focuses on infrastructure, national clouds, or data localization. These are important aspects, but alone they are not enough. An organization truly maintains control when it retains the ability to modify its operations without being completely dependent on the decisions of others.
If an AI model changes behavior, if a supplier changes its financial terms, or if a new regulation imposes different rules, what matters isn't having built every component in-house. What matters is being able to quickly intervene on processes, redefine responsibilities and operating rules, and adapt the organization's operations.
Sovereignty, in this sense, coincides with the ability to govern change.
A new balance
In the coming years, business processes will be performed simultaneously by people , intelligent agents , and robots . It's not a matter of replacing one with the other, but of building a model in which both operate according to shared rules, clear responsibilities, and adequate levels of control, with artificial intelligence at the service of people and the organization.
Artificial intelligence will make organizations faster only if we also make them more manageable. This is the challenge that is unfolding. It's not just about technology, but about how we choose to design, govern, and evolve our organizations.
The ALDIA case: Transforming an organization starting from people - not technology
The process comes first.
Always.
When Elisa Saragaglia arrived at Aldia in 2018, the cooperative had 700 employees and a turnover of €15 million. Today, it employs three thousand people, with a turnover of €70 million.
In between, years of work on processes, data, and people—in the exact order she listed them above. We met the CIO and member of the Board of Directors of Aldia Cooperativa Sociale at Jamio Community Day 2026 in Milan. She speaks with the precision of someone who measures everything, and with the conviction of someone who knows that numbers alone are not enough.
Elisa, let's start from the beginning. When you arrived at Aldia in 2018, what did you find?
I found an organization experiencing rapid growth but with processes that weren't keeping pace. There were 700 of us, a turnover of €15 million, and it was already clear that we were headed for rapid expansion. The problem was that internal processes—those governing people, orders, and hiring—were managed in a fragmented, often manual manner, with enormous dependence on individual staff. If a key person was absent, the process ground to a halt
The first move wasn't technological. Elisa began with an organizational analysis: mapping how things actually worked, not how they should have worked on paper. Only then did she understand where to intervene.
What was the first process you worked on with Jamio?
"Managing tenders and contracts. For a social cooperative like Aldia—which works primarily under contract with public entities, local health authorities, and municipalities—managing contracts is the heart of the business. Each contract has deadlines, requirements, and documents to produce. All of this was handled haphazardly, with Excel spreadsheets, emails, and personal reminders. The risk of missing a deadline or submitting incomplete documentation was real and constant.".
Elisa had been familiar with Jamio even before this project—she had already encountered the platform through a previous professional experience. It wasn't a leap into the unknown, but a conscious choice based on firsthand knowledge of the tool.
“It's not an innovation for its own sake, but rather a way to support the cooperative's evolution within a highly competitive environment.”
How did you convince the organization? Was there any resistance?
Resistance didn't arise immediately—and this surprised me. The people involved in the initial projects were motivated; they saw the problem and wanted to solve it. The difficulty came later, in the go-live phase, when daily habits really needed to be changed. That's when commitment wanes. Novelty excites, habit tires. The solution we found was to involve people from the beginning—not as end users handed a finished tool, but as co-designers of the process. Those who would use the system every day were in the room when we decided how to make it work.
It's a principle Elisa applies systematically: the process isn't imposed from above, it's built with those who will experience it. And this isn't just about accepting the tool—it's about the quality of the result.
You have a guiding principle for choosing tools: the supplier adapts to the process, not the other way around. Can you explain this further?
It seems obvious, but in practice it's the exception. What often happens is that you buy software and then adapt your processes to its logic—because it's faster, because the vendor doesn't want to customize, because IT prefers standards. The result is that people learn to work differently than they would naturally, and the organization accumulates invisible inefficiencies. We've always advocated the opposite: first understand how the process works, how it should ideally work, and then find a tool that adapts. With Jamio, this is possible—and it's not a given.
"When there were critical issues, management would pass the blame. Now there's no blame anymore—we discuss the data and find solutions together."
Let's talk numbers. What's the result you cite most often when you want to demonstrate the value of what you've done?
The onboarding process. For a cooperative that works with public procurement, September and June are critical months: contracts change, orders change, and hundreds of people need to be hired in just a few days. Before Jamio, 85% of the onboarding lead time was six days—meaning that nearly one in ten hired waited more than a week before they could start working. Now the average time has dropped to a day and a half, and 98% of hires are completed within five days. But this isn't the result I care about most.
What is it then?
“The elimination of interfunctional conflict. Before, when there was a delay or a problem, management would blame each other—HR would say that technical management hadn't sent requests on time, while technical management would say HR was slow. Now there's data. You know exactly where each case is, who's supposed to do what, how many days have passed. There's no more room for blame—only for solutions.”.
Aldia started with tenders and contracts, then moved on to onboarding. How has your relationship with the platform evolved over time?
It's the principle that Jamio's maker calls One Platform Many Solutions, and we've embraced it to the letter. When you start using a flexible tool for one process, you realize you can use it for another. And then another. We started with tenders, then moved on to HR and onboarding, then maintenance, then cross-departmental processes. Every time you solve a problem in a structured way, you already see the next problem of the same nature. The platform becomes an organizational infrastructure, not an isolated application.
There was a lot of talk about artificial intelligence at Jamio Community Day. Is Aldia already using it?
"Yes, and for longer than you might think. Since 2024, we've had an AI monitoring system for our residents in residential facilities—it detects movement in beds and flags risky situations, such as possible falls at night. It's a vertical, precise application, with a direct impact on the safety of the vulnerable people we care for."
And what about generative AI, the one we're talking about most today?
"Here, our approach is more cautious—and I stand by it. We work with vulnerable people: the elderly, minors, and people with disabilities. The responsibility is high. Before introducing any AI tool in this context, we want to understand how it works, what the risks are, and how to manage it. What we're doing is investing in people's skills—training our operators to use AI tools consciously, building on the Microsoft ecosystem we already know. We don't want to impose a tool: we want people to understand what they're using.".
There is, however, one concrete AI project that Elisa considers a priority: managing urgent operator replacements. When an operator falls ill on the morning of a shift, the coordinator must find a replacement as quickly as possible, often calling dozens of people. It's high-stress, repetitive work that leads to burnout. It's exactly the kind of problem where AI can make a difference—not by replacing the coordinator, but by freeing them from the more mechanical work to allow them to focus on what requires human judgment.
"We don't want to impose a tool. We want people to understand what they're using."
In 2025 , you joined Aldia's Board of Directors. How has that position changed your approach to digital innovation?
"Change the time perspective. As a CIO, you look at innovation with an operational perspective—what solves a problem now, how it's implemented, how it's governed. From the board of directors, you look at it with a strategic perspective—where the organization will be in five years, what skills we'll need, what dependencies we can't afford to fall into. These two perspectives complement each other. And the thing that struck me most, joining the board of directors, is how the issue of digital sovereignty—who controls the data, who controls the processes—has become a governance issue, not just an IT issue.".
Last question. At JCD 2026, we asked you what it means to you to be a changemaker. Would you repeat it here?
Change isn't forced upon you. It's built with people—starting with their problems, their daily needs, their annoyance at something that doesn't work. My job is to create the conditions for people to change the way they work without feeling threatened. If you succeed, the change becomes sustainable. Otherwise, it lasts the duration of the project, and then everything goes back to the way it was before.
Aldia Social Cooperative
Founded in 1977, Aldia is the second social cooperative in Italy. It operates in 11 Italian regions with over 3,000 employees and a turnover of €70 million. It manages social, healthcare, educational, and assistance services for public entities, local health authorities, municipalities, and private companies. Elisa Saragaglia has been CIO and a member of the Board of Directors since 2025.
The hidden complexity of digital acceleration
Every new application, automation, or digital innovation project promises increased speed and efficiency . But when systems, processes, and data evolve without a shared direction, complexity grows along with innovation. The result? Less visibility, greater fragmentation, and organizations that are increasingly difficult to govern .
In this article, we explore why today's true competitive advantage isn't about accelerating at all costs, but rather building an operating model that combines speed, integration, and control.
