Why Sovereign AI is Becoming a Business Resilience Issue

As AI becomes an increasingly integral part of business processes, concerns around operational control, resilience, vendor concentration, and geopolitical risk are having a greater impact on how the technology is deployed. That’s according to Forrester’s latest report, The Top Trends in Sovereign AI.

Expanding on findings from the tech research firm’s recent Global Sovereignty Forecast, the report argues that sovereignty is shifting beyond questions of data residency and regulation toward business resilience, operational control and governance. For organizations, that does not necessarily mean cutting themselves off from global technology providers. Instead, but understanding where their dependencies lie, which workloads are most critical and how they could continue operating if access to a key AI service were disrupted.

In this Q&A, Dario Maisto, analyst at Forrester and author of the report, discusses how organizations can navigate these dependencies and what sovereign AI means in practice.

What are the key findings from Forrester’s research, and were there any surprises?

Dario Maisto: We interviewed a range of organizations, including service providers and, primarily, end users, to understand how sovereign AI has evolved over the past year. One of the first findings was that sovereignty is relevant to organizations across virtually every industry, not just the usual suspects such as defense, government and the public sector.

The second is that sovereignty is much more than data localization or data residency. At its core, it is about being in control. It is not about isolation.

The third finding is that sovereignty is increasingly a way to improve resilience. The more organizations rely on AI across their business, organizational and mission-critical processes, the more they need to minimize or at least control their dependencies on foreign vendors, jurisdictions and governments.

What kind of danger does AI dependency pose?

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