I came into ITEC 2026 in London wearing two hats — first as an invited panellist presenting lessons from Cold Response 2026 and the use of Live, Virtual and Constructive environments in a large-scale NATO exercise, drawing on my final posting in the Army as Head of the Norwegian Army Training and Simulation Centre; and second as the CEO and Founder of Eriksen LiveSim Consult, walking the floor, taking meetings, and observing what the defence training industry is choosing to foreground. I did not see everything I had hoped to. Conference schedules rarely survive contact with reality, and a number of sessions I had planned to attend had to give way to meetings that were arguably more valuable. But what I did see — in the conference programme, on the exhibition floor, and in the margins — pointed in a consistent and, I think, significant direction.

Here are the signals that gave me reason for genuine optimism.

Signal 1: The Best Paper Award Pointed Somewhere Important

I was not in the room for Dr Sébastien Bosch’s presentation, so I will not pretend otherwise. But the ITEC committee’s choice of best paper is itself a signal worth noting. His paper, “From VHR satellite to simulation: an AI-powered reality pipeline,” addressed something the industry has been circling for years: the time and cost required to build simulation environments that are representative of the operational terrain.

The approach described — using AI to extract a complete, multi-layered environment from very high-resolution satellite imagery, with temporal and spatial coherence built in — is not incremental. It is a different way of thinking about where simulation content comes from and how quickly it can be made operationally relevant. Agile satellite constellations feeding scalable AI pipelines is the kind of capability that could fundamentally change the economics of high-fidelity training environments. The committee recognised it. I think they were right to.

Signal 2: Digital Wargaming as Validation, Not Just Planning

The presentation I found most intellectually compelling at ITEC 2026 was the Highly Commended paper by Stian Osmundsen from Levato and Major Sebastian Langvad from the Norwegian Military Academy. The ITEC committee shared that assessment.

Their presentation showed how, in experiments at the Military Academy, they used Levato’s Vantage constructive simulation and applied digital wargaming to validate future force structure concepts. This is a meaningful conceptual step forward. We have used wargaming for planning and for training for decades. Using it as a rigorous validation instrument — to test whether the force structure you are building is capable of the tasks you intend for it before you have committed the procurement budget and the organisational change — is a different and considerably more demanding application.

The Norwegian Military Academy bringing this kind of analytical rigour to force development, and doing it in partnership with a specialist simulation company, is exactly the kind of civil-military collaboration that generates genuine insight rather than contractual output. I left that presentation with many ideas, but also with more questions than I arrived with. That is usually a good sign.

Signal 3: The Customer Side Is Transforming Too

I was on a panel this year presenting Cold Response 2026 findings on LVC integration in a large-scale NATO exercise context. I will not dwell on my own contribution, other than to say that the experience of being part of designing the concept for the exercise, planning and preparing for it, and then seeing the outcomes it generated contains a wealth of lessons that I think are still being absorbed.

What struck me more was listening to the other panelists. Marwane Bahbaz presented the restructuring of what was PEO STRI into the new Capability Program Executive Simulation, Training, Test and Threat — CPE ST3. The institutional logic behind that reorganisation, and the ambition it represents for how the US Army intends to govern simulation and training technology, is significant. When the largest defence training customer in the world restructures its acquisition and programme management architecture, that is not an administrative detail.

Lieutenant Colonel Michael Dunning, the Canadian head of their simulation centre, presenting on their own transformation reinforced the same point from a different direction. The demand signal for defence synthetic training is not just growing in volume — it is becoming more institutionally sophisticated. Customers are restructuring themselves to procure and govern this capability more effectively. That matters more, in the long run, than any single product announcement.

One More: The AAR Is Continually Evolving

I should not leave out Paddy Little’s presentation on evolving the After-Action Review in a more data-driven direction. The AAR is where training value is actually realised — or lost. We have known this for as long as there have been synthetic training environments. What has lagged is the ability to digest all the training data collected and the analytical framework to do it systematically rather than depending on the memory and judgement of the observer/controllers and the Excon operators.

Moving toward data-driven AAR is not a technology problem — the data has been available for years. It is a design and doctrinal problem: deciding what you want to measure, how you want to present it, and how to structure the debrief so that it changes behaviour rather than just documenting what happened — while at the same time maintaining the important human reflective nature of the AAR. The fact that this conversation is now happening at ITEC in a serious technical paper suggests the industry is finally ready to treat the AAR as a first-class design problem.

A Consistent Direction

I did not attend every session I had planned to. I spent time in meetings rather than in the conference theatres, which is probably the honest description of what ITEC is for most practitioners. But what I did see — in the best paper, in the highly commended work, in the panel, and in the margins — pointed in the same direction.

The industry is asking harder questions: about where simulation content comes from, about whether the force structures we are building are fit for purpose, about how procurement institutions need to reorganise to govern this capability effectively, and about what the AAR is actually for and how to evolve it further. And it is building more integrated answers: ecosystems rather than platforms, pipelines rather than products.

That is a more mature conversation than we were having five years ago. I am reasonably confident that ITEC 2027 will be further along still.