Home | Resources | Copenhagen said the quiet part out loud. BLANCCO BEYOND THE BOOTH SERIES Copenhagen said the quiet part out loud. A perspective from Fredrik Forslund, VP & GM International, Blancco ITAD ASSOCIATION EUROPEAN EXECUTIVE FORUM 9 June 2026 location Copenhagen, Denmark I left Copenhagen with one clear conviction. The ITAD industry is not behind on AI. It’s ahead of a correction the rest of the enterprise technology world is only just catching up to. The operators in that room have already lived through the failure of horizontal AI. They didn’t need an analyst report to tell them it didn’t work. They felt it on the floor. Three things Copenhagen made clear that the broader market hasn’t caught up to yet.
01 Compliance is arriving just in time to eliminate the operators who thought it was the destination Every operator in that room will be compliant within five years. The EU will make sure of it. But compliance is becoming a commodity entry ticket, not a competitive advantage. The moment every operator is certified, certified means nothing. The operators who survive the compliance wave are the ones already selling something above it — real-time intelligence, verified chain of custody, validated data that travels with the asset through every handoff. Compliance is the floor. The market is about to find out how many operators built their business on it as though it were the ceiling. INSIGHT “Trust-your-ITAD vendors will lose to chain-of-custody vendors in the long run.” Andreas Fibiger, Chairman, Inside Systems 02 The AI promise wasn’t wrong. It was aimed at the wrong target — and the correction is more powerful than the original pitch The promise was horizontal AI — automating the ITAD operation end to end. It didn’t deliver. Not because AI doesn’t work, but because ITAD is not a pipeline. It is a network of decision points, each with its own variability and irreducible human judgement. What works is vertical AI — modular, bounded applications that go very deep on a single decision point. AI grading. Automated pricing. Carbon calculation. Autopilot detection. These work because the decision space is constrained. That layer is not AI. It is the director of AI. The operators asking “how do we build that orchestration layer?” are already pulling ahead of everyone else. INSIGHT The real breakthrough is the intelligence layer above the AI — the orchestration logic that decides when to invoke which module, when to route to human judgement, and how to connect every output into a continuous verified chain. 03 190 million retired drives by 2028. The volume wave doesn’t care how long you’ve been in the industry. Retired drives entering ITAD pipelines double in three years — from 95 million to 190 million globally by 2028. This is not a growth opportunity. It is a stress test arriving on a fixed date. It will sort this industry into two groups permanently — the infrastructure players and everyone else. The window to be on the right side of that divide is now. INSIGHT This is not a growth opportunity. It is a stress test arriving on a fixed date. It will sort this industry into two groups — permanently.
The Numbers Behind The Moment $17B Global ITAD market by 2030 12.3% EMEA CAGR 2025–2030 190M Retired drives by 2028 77% Prefer reuse over destruction 44% Destroyed assets still functional #1 AI — Gartner top differentiator
WHAT WE WERE REALLY SAYING IN COPENHAGEN The certified erasure report is not a compliance document. It is a data asset. And data assets are what an orchestration layer runs on. The Blancco Management Portal is the connective tissue of an intelligent operation — linking every processing environment and every decision point into a single verified view. With Blancco Mobile Workspace Edition launching July 2026, that intelligence extends to every distributed environment, not just industrial-scale operations. Professional grade. Operator simple. The operators who connect those three forces — verified intelligence, modular AI, orchestrated across every decision point — will not just survive what’s coming. They will define what ITAD looks like on the other side of it. If you’d like to explore what chain-of-custody intelligence could look like inside your operation, I’d welcome the conversation. Fredrik Forslund VP & GM International Blancco Technology Group