What does the Barometer Digital Decade 2026 say?
The Barometer Digital Decade 2026, published by accountant.nl, concludes that Dutch organisations are insufficiently prepared for the growing body of European digital legislation. The scope is broad: requirements around data management and digital reporting, through to obligations concerning traceability and data exchange across supply chains. Many businesses are aware that something is coming, but have yet to take concrete steps. That is a compounding risk: every month of delay is a month less to get systems, processes, and data in order.
Why does this affect operations, not just the legal department?
Compliance questions are too often handed off to a lawyer or an external adviser. But European digital legislation sets requirements for how data is recorded in operations, who has access, how long records are retained, and how information is exchanged with supply chain partners, regulators, and customers. You cannot solve that with a policy document. It sits in your ERP, your TMS, your WMS, your production management system. If those systems do not produce structured, exportable, and auditable data, you are exposed. Not in five years, but at the very next audit or client requirement.
Which sectors face the greatest risk?
Logistics and transport are already dealing with the truck toll coming into effect on 1 July 2026, which requires trip records and vehicle data to be demonstrably accurate. The trade sector faces increasing requirements around product traceability and digital customs declarations. In industry, obligations around sustainability reporting and supply chain data are playing an ever-greater role. What these sectors have in common: the data needed for compliance is spread across multiple systems, manual processes, and email threads. There is no single source of truth. That is precisely where things go wrong.
What helps: structured data as the starting point
The core of the problem is not that businesses do not know the rules. It is that their systems do not capture data in a structured way. Orders arrive by email, are entered manually, documents are saved as PDFs without searchable metadata, and reports are compiled in Excel. That works until you need to demonstrate that a shipment was carried out at a specific time, on a specific route, by a specific party. Or until you need to report digitally on emissions, origin, or processing times. AI helps in two ways. First, by automatically structuring existing documents and data streams: emails, packing lists, consignment notes, and invoices are made machine-readable and converted into data. Second, by building new systems so that data is structured, traceable, and shareable from the outset. That is not a secondary concern; it is the infrastructure on which compliance depends.
When is it time to address the system itself?
Not every business needs to replace its core system. If the current system runs reasonably well but does not capture or export data properly, an AI layer around it can already resolve a great deal: automatically structuring incoming documents, connecting disparate data streams, generating reports from existing records. But if the core system itself is the source of data loss, because fields are missing, processes are handled outside the system, or the architecture does not align with modern integration requirements, then adding an AI layer on top is not a sustainable solution. That is the point at which to assess whether redevelopment makes sense. It is not a simple decision, but delay does not make it cheaper.