When consumer brands deliver a poor customer experience, people can take their business elsewhere. But there’s a category of experiences where that isn’t true, at least not in the moment. Sometimes it’s structural, like public services: taxes, permits, passports. Sometimes it’s situational, like regulated industries: urgent care, claims, fraud response, service outages.  

In those moments, customers and citizens are captive to the process, and the stakes change. Every delay, handoff, or lack of transparency becomes more than an inconvenience. It begins to erode trust in the institutions people depend on.  

Understanding the Experience Gap 

Still, people have the same expectations when engaging with government and regulated industries as they do with other businesses. They’ve used apps that recognize them and anticipate their needs. They’ve tracked packages in real time. They’ve had problems resolved in minutes through AI virtual agents.  

Those expectations for speed, transparency, and personalization collide with processes and technology designed for control, compliance and risk management. The result isn’t just dissatisfaction; it’s increased cost to serve, higher complaint volume, stalled adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital channels, and burnout for the teams tasked with holding it all together. Over time, that gap shows up as something harder to quantify but impossible to ignore: an erosion in trust.  

This experience gap is a well-known challenge for public sector and regulated industries across Europe. In many sectors, modernization is cautious for good reasons.  

For instance, public agencies are stewards of sensitive data and operate under strict legal, security, and procurement constraints. Our recent survey report in collaboration with AWS and PAC found that 69% of European public sector and social services organizations rely on their own or colocation data centers or private clouds.  

This approach, while rooted in valid security and risk concerns, can slow the adoption of modern, AI-powered CX platforms that deliver the personalized experiences people now expect. In fact, 49% of surveyed public-sector organizations think they are lagging their peers in the adoption of AI. 

Balancing AI Innovation and Trust  

In addition to improving citizen and customer experiences, there’s a growing concern over data and operational sovereignty. Leaders in the public sector and regulated industries face a dual mandate — innovate and protect. They’re challenged to modernize services and accelerate AI adoption while maintaining ownership and control over sensitive data, the systems that process it and the teams that operate it.  

Complicating matters, the bar keeps moving.  

Europe’s regulatory environment is evolving at European Union (EU), national and industry-specific levels, increasing complexity for organizations and the solution providers they rely on. Frameworks like the EU AI Act and ISO/IEC 42001 are setting the baseline for responsible AI, while regulations like The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) raise the standard for operational resilience in the EU financial sector. 

Innovation must not come at the cost of control, and it doesn’t have to. Cloud platforms now exist that embed sovereignty into their foundation. Public sector and regulated industries can access the same advanced AI and orchestration tools driving consumer experiences without compromising data control, jurisdiction or operational independence.

Introducing the Genesys Cloud European Sovereign Region 

Planned to launch mid-2026, the Genesys Cloud™ European Sovereign region is designed for organizations in the public sector and highly regulated industries like healthcare, financial services, energy and utilities. The Genesys Cloud platform, available on the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, will enable organizations across Europe to modernize service experiences with AI-powered orchestration, while also enabling them to meet stringent regulatory, data residency and sovereign-driven operational requirements.  

The new sovereign region will be in Brandenburg, Germany, alongside five existing Genesys Cloud commercial regions in Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Zürich and Paris). This will give organizations freedom to choose the right level of sovereignty and control to meet their regulatory and risk requirements. 

Adding to the protections of Genesys Cloud commercial regions, the European Sovereign region will help organizations meet heightened data residency and operational governance requirements. Here are five core benefits it is designed to deliver: 

1. Keep customer data in the EU: Customer data will be processed and stored within the EU to support data residency and sovereignty requirements. Access will be restricted to EU-based personnel operating under European data protection standards.

2. Operate under EU governance: Genesys Cloud European Sovereign region services will be governed, contracted and delivered within the EU, under EU legal frameworks, supported by EU-based personnel

3. Scale AI responsibly: Genesys AI is purpose-built, trained on billions of customer actions and built from the ground up to understand intent, context and emotion. AI capabilities are native to the platform, with built-in guardrails, and are ready to use on day one

4. Get sovereignty without compromise: Drive value and efficiency across the entire customer experience journey with access to a comprehensive set of Genesys Cloud capabilities, not a feature-limited sovereign subset.

5. Deploy with confidence: Genesys Cloud European Sovereign region will run on the AWS European Sovereign Cloud — a new fully featured, independently operated sovereign cloud backed by strong technical controls, sovereign assurances and legal protections designed to meet the needs of European governments and enterprises for sensitive data. 

Strengthening Trust and Enhancing Experiences  

The next frontier in CX is agentic AI, systems that can take action to resolve issues in real time. As autonomy increases, so do the risks, especially in public sector and regulated industries. Narrowing the experience gap will require organizations to scale AI responsibly, with the right guardrails and human oversight, so they can build trust as the technology becomes more capable. 

Now is the time to act. Whether your organization is best served by a Genesys Cloud European commercial region or the upcoming Genesys Cloud European Sovereign region, the goal is the same. Deliver modern, reliable AI-powered experiences with the right level of sovereignty and control. Narrow the experience gap, and you do more than improve satisfaction. You strengthen public confidence and customer trust. 

Genesys Cloud European Sovereign region is expected to be available on the AWS European Sovereign Cloud in mid-2026. Learn how the Genesys Cloud European Sovereign region can help you meet sovereignty and compliance requirements while scaling AI responsibly.