Are you in control of your digital destiny? In this episode, Alan Pringle and Sarah O’Keefe define digital sovereignty. They break down what organizations need to consider as they bring AI into content operations, from data leakage and competitive intelligence to shifting international regulations.

Sarah O’Keefe: The working definition that I’m using is that digital sovereignty is control over your own digital assets, digital destiny. That could be you personally, it could be you as an organization, or it could be you as a country or as a group of nations. And when I say group of nations, probably 98% of the time I’m talking about the EU, which has some laws in this regard. Digital sovereignty is your ability to control, own, and manage your digital assets and how they are used, reused, processed, resold, repurposed, and all the rest of it.

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Transcript:

Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.

Introduction with ambient background music

Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.

Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.

Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky; you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.

Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and processes that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.

End of introduction

AP: Hey everybody, I’m Alan Pringle.

SO: And I’m Sarah O’Keefe, hello.

AP: Hey there. And today Sarah and I want to talk about something that’s really starting to come to the forefront with all of the AI things that are going on in our world. And that is digital sovereignty. And before we get too deep in that, I need to throw up many, many disclaimers. Sarah and I are not lawyers, nor do we play them on television.

And we are absolutely not lawyers or experts on anything in regard to international intellectual property. So with those disclaimers out there, Sarah, if you would, would you define what digital sovereignty is?

SO: The working definition that I’m using is that digital sovereignty is control over your own digital assets, digital destiny. That could be you personally, it could be you, the organization, or it could be you as a country or as a group of nations. And when I say group of nations, probably 98% of the time I’m talking about the EU, which has some laws in this regard. So it is your ability to control, own, and manage your digital assets and how they are used, reused, processed, resold, repurposed, and all the rest of it.

AP: And I’m going to give a very basic example from my personal life in regard to email. Years ago, actually decades ago, when I got set up with an internet service provider, they provided me with an email address. It had their company name in the domain.com. And I used it for years. But when I switched my ISP, guess what? I had to make a decision.

Do I continue to pay that old ISP, basically rent, to maintain that old email address? Or should I move to one of maybe the free email providers? So I did a little research, and my ultimate decision was I created my own domain with my name, and I kind of just decided not to ever use again the email provided by an ISP because if you switch it, you’re going to possibly lose control of that email address. And at the time that I made the switch, a lot of the free providers, they would scan your email to provide targeted ads and some other things that was kind of unsavory to me.

So I ultimately made the decision I was going to own the domain and set that up myself and pick my own software that I hooked up to it to use to to read it. And I did not use a third-party email provider to basically pull in or reference my account. I am using an open-source standalone email client to kind of minimize who can poke into my email. So that’s one very basic example of how I kind of took control of my digital life as it were.

SO: Right. And if we apply that to content ops, again, staying pretty general, you think about cloud systems, like the cloud universe versus on-prem.

AP: Yes.

SO: And when you talk about, let’s say, a CCMS, a component content management system that is on-premises, the the argument was always, well, that way all of our content lives on our servers, in our organization, we have complete control over it.

Along come the cloud services, the cloud-based CCMSs and everything else. And they say, well, yes, but it’s much cheaper for you to put this into the cloud on our systems, which are shared. And you know, there’s advantages of upgrading, and there’s all sorts of advantages to cloud systems, mostly around IT overhead. from a digital sovereignty point of view.

You are delegating to that cloud system and you have some sort of a contract or a service level agreement. And again, we are not lawyers, but you have this agreement that says we the cloud provider promise to not scan your information or not use it for evil or not, you know, there’s a bunch of stuff in that contract that governs how cloud provider is or is not allowed to handle your content, your personal information, your credit card information that you might be putting in there and all the rest of it. And with software as a service, with cloud systems, we have for the most part cut over into cloud. You know, that’s that’s kind of the default these days. There’s hardly anybody that is still putting their content, their content and their content management systems on their own proprietary in-house servers.

AP: Yes, correct.

SO: So we have decided that for cloud, you know, cloud writ large generally, that the advantages of cloud outweigh the disadvantages. Now, moving this a little bit more towards content and slowly towards AI, where things get really interesting with digital sovereignty, if we talk about machine translation for a minute.

There are a couple of different ways of doing machine translation, obviously, but big picture, you can have your in-house machine translation system and database, and you can control that and govern it and do things with it. Or you can take your content and you can throw it at a public-facing machine translation system. And the risk that you run when you throw something at a public system is that they will take your proprietary confidential content.

And use it. So I throw at it a sentence that says, the XYZ company has developed a special new thing, right? And I need that translated into various languages and I get it translated. But as a result of that, I am leaking information. I am leaking my confidential, p...