Outside Systematic's stand at DALO Industry Days 2026, the crowd speaks volumes: French delegations, Japanese visitors scouting software for a market on the other side of the world, and a steady flow of Danish officers who have watched the company grow from a domestic supplier into one of the reference names in NATO command and control.

The trip to DALO Industry Days is sponsored by BAE Systems Bofors

Nikolaj Bramsen, CEO of the Danish software company, has a front-row seat to that growth. Two years after SitaWare was selected as NATO's standard for battle management software, Nordic Defence Sector sat down with him to talk through what the win has meant since, and where he sees the company heading next.

Two years on from being named NATO's standard, how much is that reference still driving growth today?

"It's a key and strong reference," Bramsen says. "Of course, it's also helped; part of the growth we had this last year is also building upon that, being the reference of choice in NATO." The company already counts a majority of NATO's member states as customers, a base Bramsen says continues to expand.

Systematic's roots are Danish, first building for the country's own armed forces. The company landed its first military contract for the Royal Danish Navy in 1986. SitaWare was in April 2024 selected by NATO to become the standard command-and-control software used in land operations.

How has the shift to an international customer base changed the way the company builds software?

"We have a strong belief in what we are doing, building what we call a commercial off-the-shelf product (COTS)" he explains. "We do a standard solution that all the nations buy into. They buy into a shared roadmap and a shared vision of where the program is going."

Local integrations still happen where individual nations need specific functionality, Bramsen says, but the core of what is deployed across all 50+ nations using the platform remains the same solution and the same software. He argues that this scale compounds: every new customer adds to the investment behind the shared roadmap and speeds up the pace at which new functionality reaches everyone already using it.

Does chasing interoperability across so many nations slow down delivery to any one of them?

Bramsen rejects the premise outright. "I wouldn't say so. I think it's at the heart of what we're doing," he says. "We need to be able to create ecosystems. When you are the digital backbone of a lot of communication and planning and operation, you need to allow other companies to interoperate with that."

Interoperability was one of the defining themes at DALO Industry Days 2026, as European allies continue to push to work more closely together.

According to Bramsen, this is a key focus in developing SitaWare further, describing the approach as giving nations control over their own technology stack rather than locking them into a single vendor: "Nations can plug their own solutions in. They can build an ecosystem of suppliers on top of our solutions, and if they have a module where they want something else, they can plug something else in.”

Ukrainian forces have built and fielded improvised command and control tools of their own, often faster than traditional procurement allows. How directly are those battlefield lessons feeding into Systematic's roadmap?

"It's both a technology and an AI perspective, building an AI solution now versus where we were five or six years ago," he says. "Getting the lessons learned from the battlefront in Ukraine and building that into our software, and the whole new range of technologies on the battleground today with autonomous vehicles and drones, has naturally changed our roadmap and how we develop things."

He is careful to draw a distinction between a nation actively fighting a war and one preparing for the possibility of one: "There's a difference being in a war, where you take all the risk because you need to win, and there's a difference to preparing for a war. We have to incorporate that into our solutions and the way we work with them."

Autonomous decision-making is one of the sharpest questions the industry faces right now. Where does Systematic draw the line today on AI and human control?

"We invest a lot of time in doing our AI development responsibly," he says. "Showing how it thinks, how it draws its conclusions, so you can always figure out how it reached that conclusion. It doesn't reach a conclusion unless there's actually data to support it. It doesn't hallucinate."

But Bramsen is candid that the boundary is not fixed, and that Systematic is already preparing for a world in which it moves.

"We are facing a great threat from Russia. If they are pushing the boundaries of how they're operating, we need to be able to adapt," he says. "If a war occurs, the risk appetite increases. You won't have a Skynet, you won't have a computer controlling everything else, but maybe the scope of decisions being made with AI should be able to scale within secure boundaries, still within reason." He frames it as a balance the company cannot resolve on principle alone: "We cannot only decide this from an ideological perspective. We also have to accept that we are facing a threat that doesn't have the same morals that we do. And that's the world we live in."

Why does keeping a human in the loop matter so much, both tactically and as a design principle?

"At the heart of what we do, and actually in healthcare too, lives are at stake when we develop software," he says. "Even though we only develop software and don't do any hardware, decisions impact lives, and we have to be respectful of that. If we have AI taking greater responsibility, we need to make sure it does it the most minimal-risk way, that we reduce the impact on human lives as much as possible. In that sense, AI can help reduce risk and save lives, it's not implemented to the opposite."

A recurring theme among Ukrainian exhibitors this year has been intuitiveness, systems simple enough that a soldier can learn them quickly under pressure. Does the same principle sit behind Systematic's SitaWare suite?

"The ease of use of any system is at the heart of what you're doing," he says. "Any user needs to be focused on their operational task, not the software itself. There's complexity to what we're doing when you want to coordinate multi-domain operations across NATO allies. That's a complex task, so there are complex parts to our solution. But bringing that down to intuitive tools at the battlefront, for users to make quick and efficient decisions, is really what we are trying to design."

Systematic's stand at this year's show comes a day after the company announced a partnership with Thales tying SitaWare into the French firm's ground-based air defense systems. Is that deal a model for how you expect the company to grow?

"It's building on our strength, actually helping facilitate the creation of an ecosystem where you can pick the best solutions," he says. "It's enabling us to secure Denmark in an efficient way, bringing AI into the planning and positioning of these kinds of systems, together with what Thales is providing."

The next phase, he says, is as much about infrastructure as it is about software, combining compute at the edge with larger data centers, and knitting together technology from Systematic and its wider network of partners.

Looking ahead three years, what will success have looked like?

“Whether it's us facilitating the work between allies and nations in NATO and other countries, or it's from a technology perspective between different companies: it's making a system that's greater than the sum of its parts," he says. "If we keep succeeding at that, we will continue to grow in the next three years."