Alexander Grif:
“The entry point to technological sovereignty lies through cognitive management systems and a severalfold increase in labor productivity”

The global electronics and semiconductor industry is facing a paradoxical crisis. Investment in the sector is breaking records, and demand for new solutions is colossal, yet the industry has hit a severe dead end – a total shortage of qualified engineers and systems architects. Designing modern Systems-on-Chip (SoC) and complex electronic components has become exponentially more difficult. Classical optimization methods – Agile, Lean, the implementation of advanced ERP and PLM systems – no longer provide a multiplier effect on efficiency. Process automation has exhausted itself, leaving a crucial question unanswered: how do you automate and protect the developer’s thinking itself?

We sat down with Alexander Grif, Chairman of the Committee on Digital and Technological Sovereignty at the Business Centre for CIS economic development and Head of the scientific laboratory for the study of the ontology of cognitive, digital, and technological sovereignty at the International Research Institute for Advanced Systems, to discuss why technological sovereignty is impossible without cognitive sovereignty, how Value-Semantic Cognitive Self-Governance (VSCSG) technologies eliminate “semantic noise” in production, and how this approach solves the problem of talent shortages in the electronics industry.

The Global Labor Productivity Crisis

Editorial: Alexander, today the shortage of engineers in microelectronics numbers in the hundreds of thousands worldwide. Companies are trying to linearly expand their staff, but there simply aren’t enough people. You claim that the entry point to solving this problem lies through “cognitive technologies”. What does this concretely mean for a design centre director or a CTO of a technology company?

Alexander Grif: We must acknowledge a fact: the extensive development path of the High-Tech industry is over. We cannot simply hire twice as many circuit designers or embedded software programmers – they are physically absent from the market, and their training takes years. Today, the entry point for genuinely increasing labor productivity is the optimization of working with information, values, and meanings, defining the norms and evaluation criteria upon which measurable goals within engineering teams are built.

When we speak of cognitive technologies in practice, we mean creating an information-digital environment that takes over routine cognitive operations, verification of architectural decisions, and protection of the engineer from data overload. The goal is to ensure that a single high-class specialist, through an effectively formed IT system within the company’s overall philosophy – which in turn is synchronized with every employee – performs a volume of work that previously required an entire department.

Editorial: But large enterprises are already automated “to the limit”. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems, project management tools, and the best CAD platforms have been implemented. Why has this software stopped providing a multiplier effect on efficiency?

Alexander Grif: Because traditional software automates processes, but not thinking. A PLM system, roughly speaking, records where an engineer placed a drawing or configuration file and how that file moves through the approval chain. But software does not help the engineer make a personal creative contribution at the moment of a critical architectural decision. It comes nowhere close to verifying that the company’s values are embedded in the product, and it does not protect against semantic errors at the intersection of different subsystems. Classical IT tooling has hit the human cognitive ceiling. At the input, the engineer faces terabytes of documentation, standards, and code; at the output, a deficit of time and colossal “semantic noise” from their personal values, leading to design errors and delayed Time-to-Market.

VSCSG Architecture: From Philosophy to IT Product

Editorial: You are the co-author and a key figure in the implementation of Value-Semantic Cognitive Self-Governance (VSCSG) technology. For an engineer or IT architect, this sounds like abstract philosophy. Let’s drill down to the data level: what does VSCSG look like as an applied IT solution?

Alexander Grif: There’s no abstraction here; it is a rigid system architecture. VSCSG is a cognitive superstructure over the existing enterprise landscape (CAD/EDA/PLM). To simplify, it is an intelligent ontological system for managing each employee’s personal values, meanings, knowledge, norms, evaluation criteria, and goal-setting.

It operates at the level of values and meanings. The system “understands” the architectural logic of the product being created, compares it with the enterprise’s value-based and technological constraints (e.g., available component base, reliability requirements, sanctions risks), and acts in real-time as a cognitive navigator for the developer. It doesn’t just search for errors in code or schematics; it manages the engineer’s focus of attention, filtering out up to 80% of information noise and suggesting optimal design patterns.

Editorial: Can you describe a working day for a lead chip developer or systems engineer into whose practice VSCSG has been integrated?

Alexander Grif: The main difference is the elimination of the gap between task setting, design, and verification. In usual practice, an engineer spends a massive amount of time on approvals, searching for documentation, and correcting hidden semantic contradictions that only “surface” during the prototype testing phase.

Within the VSCSG loop, the system automatically pulls up the relevant context for the current sub-task, verifies the architectural solution against the product’s general concept, and instantly highlights risks. The engineer engages in pure creativity and design, while the system maintains the value-semantic framework of the project. Verification errors are reduced practically to zero, and decision-making speed increases severalfold.

Cognitive Sovereignty vs. AI Dependency

Editorial: There is currently a boom in generative AI. Any director will say: “I will just connect an LLM (neural network) to my database, and it will help engineers write code and design boards”. How does your approach differ from standard AI agents?

Alexander Grif: Regular Large Language Models (LLMs) are statistical generators of text and code. They lack an understanding of values, meanings, and system ontology; they often “hallucinate” and produce syntactically correct but architecturally erroneous solutions. In electronics, a single mistake in a trace or microcontroller timing costs millions of dollars and months of lost time.

VSCSG is built on deterministic semantic models where logic and rules are strictly defined. But the main difference is not even in the technology, but in security. Blindly using foreign or public AI platforms means directly surrendering your intellectual potential. This brings us to the concept of cognitive sovereignty.

Editorial: Explain this term. The industry is fighting for technological sovereignty (its own fabs, lithography machines) and digital sovereignty (its own software). Why is cognitive sovereignty becoming the primary survival factor?

Alexander Grif: Technological sovereignty is hardware. Digital sovereignty is software. But who manages the design logic of this hardware and software? If your engineers are educated, think, and make decisions within the framework of cognitive models and AI algorithms created by your competitors, you will never be sovereign.

Cognitive sovereignty is the independence and protection of the mental algorithms and thought processes of your specialists and the enterprise’s AI systems. It is the ability of a company or state to form its own values, meanings, goals, and technological standards without succumbing to external cognitive programming and manipulation. It is the basis without which the “hardware” and “software” will remain merely copies of someone else’s technologies.

Entering the International Level: The MENA Vector

Editorial: You are actively working with the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, serving as the CIS representative in the Sultanate of Oman. The Gulf countries are currently investing billions in creating their own semiconductor hubs. Are they interested in your concept?

Alexander Grif: The interest is colossal because they see the same dead ends of extensive growth. Take the UAE, Saudi Arabia, or Oman: they can buy any factories and hire top Western consultants. But they understand that in doing so, they would only buy yesterday’s technology and fall into complete dependence on foreign IT ecosystems.

For them, the concept of cognitive and technological sovereignty is a chance to engage in “leapfrogging” (skipping technological stages). By implementing VSCSG-class systems, the young technological hubs of the Middle East can exponentially accelerate the development of their own engineering schools, building sovereign management of complex projects without blindly copying Western monopolies.

Editorial: As an architect of the “International Organization for Digital Sovereignty” ) IODS) and the International Public Organization “International Sustainable Development” (ISD), how do you envision technological partnership in the current realities of market fragmentation?

Alexander Grif: The era of globalization is being replaced by an era of strong technological blocs. Our partnership with the countries of the Middle East and Asia should not be built on a “seller-buyer” model, but on the joint creation of a sovereign IT and cognitive architecture. We offer a methodology, technologies, and solutions that allow each alliance participant to maintain sovereignty while exchanging technological achievements, bypassing any sanctions and monopoly restrictions.

Conclusion from the Editorial Team

The discussion with Alexander Grif shifts the debate on digital and technological sovereignty from the plane of “how to catch up and copy” to “how to change the rules of the game”. In an environment where the shortage of human resources has become the main brake on the electronics industry, betting on business process automation no longer works.

VSCSG technologies and the concept of cognitive sovereignty offer a pragmatic, systemic solution: shift the focus of IT solutions toward the managed optimization of the engineer’s thinking and the protection of the intellectual capital of companies and nations. For the High-Tech industry, this could become the very lever that allows a qualitative leap in labor productivity, transforming the talent shortage from a fatal problem into a task with a clear architectural solution.