By Jim Kent

Electricity, water, gas we consider utilities, it is our right to have access (as long as we pay the bill) — essential to modern life, regulated, and taken for granted until they stop working. But as technology becomes more deeply woven into our economies and societies, a new question emerges: when does technology itself become a utility?

For many people, that point has already arrived.

Do you feel lost when you have no wifi?

The internet and this now means the Cloud, powers everything from banking to healthcare; without it, businesses would grind to a halt. Data is now as vital to decision-making as energy is to machinery. Artificial intelligence, meanwhile, is fast becoming the invisible infrastructure of modern enterprise — driving risk analysis, logistics, customer service, and cybersecurity.

In short, technology has moved beyond being a tool for productivity. It has become the environment in which productivity happens.

The transition from innovation to utility often follows a familiar curve. First comes experimentation, then dependence, and finally standardisation. Electricity followed this path: once a luxury, then an advantage, now a necessity. The same is true of connectivity — first dial-up, then broadband, now omnipresent Wi-Fi and mobile data. AI and data analytics are on the same trajectory. What begins as competitive edge eventually becomes baseline expectation.

There’s also a regulatory dimension. The moment governments step in to ensure universal access, reliability, and security, a technology effectively becomes a utility. We’ve already seen this in Europe’s Digital Services Act and proposed AI regulations, which aim to make the digital environment safer and more transparent — much as 20th-century laws once stabilised the energy and telecom sectors.

In Luxembourg, for example, discussions around sovereign cloud infrastructure and critical data hosting signal that certain digital capabilities are no longer optional. They are matters of national resilience.

Yet, there’s a subtle danger when technology reaches this level of dependence. Innovation slows when an industry becomes utility-like. Competition shifts from creativity to compliance. Monopolies can emerge, and disruption becomes harder. Balancing ubiquity with openness — ensuring that digital utilities remain dynamic rather than stagnant — is one of the great policy and business challenges of the next decade.

Ultimately, technology becomes a utility when life and business can no longer function without it. But the line shouldn’t stop there. The real test is not just how essential tech has become, but how responsibly we manage its power — ensuring that our digital infrastructure serves everyone, not just those who built it.