At the organization's Malmo event, where attendance grew 30 percent year on year, the mood moved from agreeing that digital sovereignty matters to planning rollouts.
The European Commission has deployed Element's Matrix-based software at scale, starting with a proof of concept in Q4 2025 and reaching laptops between July and September 2026, hosted by the Schengen Cloud Alliance, which includes OVHcloud.
Matrix is positioned as an alternative to products such as Microsoft Teams, and earlier public-sector users include France's Tchap and Germany's BundesMessenger, with the Swedish public sector among more recent adopters.
At the event, messages were sent between French, Swedish, and NATO entities.
Element CEO Matthew Hodgson said various national militaries keep calling because they need to talk to countries already on Matrix.
The European Commission's Diana Gheorghe said the goals included resilience, business continuity, vendor diversity, and data control and ownership.
Microsoft points to its own sovereign capabilities, including new options to run AI, data services, and confidential workloads on customer-controlled platforms, though a Microsoft representative said in 2025 that it "cannot guarantee" data sovereignty to customers in France.
The attention has brought scrutiny. A report on anonymous reactions to the Commission rollout surprised Element, the company that puts in most of the money behind Matrix, but Gheorghe called the complaints the natural friction of a high-profile rollout at scale. Element's Patrick Alberts said the aim is a sovereign tool that works like Teams in many respects rather than a faster one. Funding is a continuing concern: Element covers much of the Matrix Foundation's budget, which Hodgson called poor governance for an open standard. He said modest contributions from governments that depend on Matrix would let the foundation invest in the ecosystem, and noted that things have improved over the past year.