CEOs Bet Big on AI, But Data Sovereignty Proves Elusive

CEOs from top companies revealed that AI systems have already made 25% of their operational decisions by early 2026, and this number is expected to jump to 48% by 2030.

However, a growing trend among enterprises shows that they are hauling back workloads from public cloud services. Currently, 24% of companies have done so, while another 38% plan to do the same in the near future.

The main issue here is what's known as a 'control problem', which falls squarely on the Chief Data Officer (CDO) desk. This is because all AI models, agents, and inference pipelines rely heavily on data. Break any part of this chain, such as governance, access, or portability, and everything above it will break.

IBM, in particular, found that when they asked about residency requirements, the main challenge was not legal but rather the technical complexity of localization. This highlights the difficulties in switching AI vendors due to data portability, model revalidation, and compliance issues.