Back in 2006, Clive Humby coined the phrase ‘data is the new oil’. It’s catchy and summed up the way the world was waking up to value locked inside the data deposits, not just of traditional data, but of user and behaviour data that were being generated as more and more users engaged with an ever-growing number of web, and later mobile applications.

The recent boom in AI has been powered, in part, by the availability of training material – various models have been trained by ingesting huge amounts of data from across the internet. 

As organisations progress in harnessing the power of AI, huge amounts of non-public information and internal data will be shared with AI models, some run privately by the organisation, and some used as a service. Ultimately, the learning process will yield some results; but who owns the learnings? And what do we mean by ‘learnings’?

Let’s start with the latter – ‘learnings’, as AI models become ever more sophisticated, the knowledge they encapsulate has the potential to become very valuable. Now, your data is your data, possibly your intellectual property, possibly commercially sensitive – but what happens with the insights, the linkages discovered in your data, or discovered in conjunction with the data from others? If we’re fuelling the equity valuation of a supplier by letting them create value not just from the service they provide (processing), but the learnings that come from that processing that gives them the ability to charge us and others a higher premium, is that just capitalism at play, or is it a manifestly unfair shift of value?

Where this intersects with the public sector there are a number of factors that need to be addressed. The UK government is encouraging the public sector to invest early in AI to lead the way; that potentially means paying vendors, whose models will learn from our data, provide insights etc. which then can be used to sell to further organisations. That’s the state paying for the privilege of helping commercial organisations move forward. Of course, AI also requires substantial investment from those commercial entities, but there is a balance that needs to be struck.

In a changing technical landscape, both governance and commercial guidance need to keep pace. The productivity gains AI promises are too good to pass up; the technology is moving at pace, the challenge is now on governance and commercial teams to move fast. 

To help navigate this, and to discover what AI can do for your organisation – apply for our free AI readiness assessment