At a surface level, the clamor around AI sovereignty might seem at odds with IT ecosystems built with global, open source resources. Marco Bill, CIO at Red Hat, offered a different perspective in InformationWeek’s CIO Reality Check .
During the video interview, Bill broke down what AI sovereignty means for his organization and how it might be achieved in an interconnected world.
It is no secret that many of the IT resources AI uses can span continents for many enterprises. Nation-states have called for AI sovereignty, in which critical AI resources such as data and infrastructure are held under a region or organization’s control. This speaks to concerns regulators have that aggressor states — or even allies — might get ahead in the AI race, or snatch up information they should not have.
Bill, whose career in IT spans more than 30 years, said organizations should take inventory of their resources to know where their data resides. In addition to complying with policy, this can help catch trouble early. A data problem can take years to address, he said, including restructuring around that data. The need to take such an inventory can become even higher priority if the business works with the military or another government entity that requires greater scrutiny.
“Start the inventory, start with the business cases that you have. The inventory is not just data; it’s literally the whole architecture,” Bill said.
Such knowledge can make the difference in knowing where a certain stack can be deployed and where it cannot. Naturally, adherence to each country’s laws and protection against reputational risk remain essential to AI sovereignty. That makes a detailed inventory vital for organizations that may have widely distributed resources that feed their AI.
“The inventory really has got to be pretty granular to actually know where is the service coming from, where is the data going to, where is your stack or your application that connects to these services,” Bill said.
The edited video interview with Bill is above, with a further insight into how the push for AI sovereignty is ramping up and how it affects different industries.
