European Cloud Alliance: How to achieve AI-driven business

Many industries are going through a digital transformation, and artificial intelligence (AI) is a key driver of it. It is changing the way how businesses and developers think about innovation and the ways how it will deeply transform our lives. Cloud computing can also contribute a great deal to the development of AI because of the need for huge computational power. However, the availability of open data is critical to achieve AI breakthroughs. Unfortunately, data is sometimes not shared because of regulatory and non-regulatory challenges. Initiatives, such as the Open Data Initiative can help overcome these obstacles and make sense of digital information for digital transformation.

Customer data ownership and control

A number of principles could help to make open data a success story in order to achieve AI-driven business outcomes. Including customer data ownership and control, as well as keeping the data formats open and extensible. Open data is also important to prevent problems that come with limited training sets, such as false positives/negatives and biases. It helps to avoid data consolidation in the hands of a few, which can stifle innovation. Of course, there are legitimate concerns related to open data and privacy. Therefore, there should be a structured approach to make progress in data sharing. Such approach could include standard legal terms for data access and sharing, privacy enhancing technologies and software tools to enable data sharing. Looking ahead, there is a need for tools to address licensing and governance needs more broadly.

Encourage open data and data sharing

Furthermore, the public policy agenda needs to encourage open data and data sharing. Finally, there is a need to advance the synergies between the legal aspects pertaining to open data with the governance, privacy and technical aspects of it.