Ready to deploy AI? Read this first
By Matthew Simmons
AI is here to stay, with more organisations jumping on the AI train everyday.
To reach a successful destination of deploying AI within your company effectively and reaping the benefits AI promises, the right precautions ought to be taken.
I'm sharing a few data governance and compliance guidelines companies ought to consider before deploying AI. I'll also be discussing the emerging trends and technologies relating to data governance and compliance, which will in turn impact AI trends.
Don't be hasty! Follow these steps before jumping on the AI train
1. Plan and plan, again
Plan, assess, define, plan, discover, and plan again. It is key to ensure that your Data Governance and Compliance strategies are rock solid before considering using Microsoft Copilot or any alternative AI tool. I fell in love with Microsoft Copilot ages ago. Microsoft share their latest insight on their Generative AI tool, Copilot, in their recent blog.
2. Know the who, what, where, when, and how of the data you have
Start by ensuring you know all about your data and how it will interact with any AI system. Additionally, have roles developed, along with your policies and procedures, that can act as the checks and balances for the quality of data coming from AI generation. Imagine an expert spin doctor who can tell you how good things are but also how bad things are with the same data. AI will do the same unless trained and guided correctly. What's the point of data analysis if it's producing a poor analysis?
3. Ask: What data can AI access?
You should also look at your cyber security thoroughly and understand the impact of allowing AI to assess certain data sets. For example, enabling the salaries of all workers to be visible to everyone within your company wouldn't be advisable.
You should have those access controls locked down and the resulting analysis also controlled to only enable access to those who need to see it.
4. Regulatory compliance
Finally, think about any necessary regulatory compliance and whether using AI would breach this. There is also the ethical question of using AI, which might need to be discussed. Data Privacy may well come into that regulatory compliance area as well with GDPR and personably identifiable information. Do you need a Compliance tool such as Microsoft Purview to redact information before AI sees it?
Data and governance guidelines to follow to ensure you safely deploy AI within your organisation
The emerging trends and technologies impacting data governance and compliance
1. AI and machine learning
The biggest influencer today is the use of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, which has helped simplify the process of searching out data and classifying automatically. However, like any form of AI, it is also about checks and balances and ensuring that results are correctly verified to produce accurate and safe answers for business use.
2. Cloud technology adoption
Alongside AI, with the rise of cloud technologies expanding rapidly, data strategies have to become more tailored for the new environments. From a governance side, ensuring that there are single copies of data and where that data resides has become a much bigger issue for those without a robust data governance framework.
3. Unified Data Governance portals
We have started to see the emergence of unified Data Governance portals, which are rapidly gaining popularity. Microsoft has been pushing this recently with their newly launch Purview Governance portal.
The portal allows for the integration of connectors from various sources across different cloud providers, as well as within the Microsoft 365 stack.
Data Governance
Implementing data governance and compliance procedures should be a top priority for organisations. Yet, establishing an effective process for data management and governance is often a challenge. Our data governance guide can help.
Learn more about data governance
Ready to speak to an expert?
If you have any questions about data governance, or you're ready to improve your data management strategy, then we're here to work with you.
