Unlocking ROI: How Sovereign AI Platforms Accelerate Innovation

Exclusive Interview with Kevin Dallas, Chief Executive Officer, Enterprise DB

You interviewed more than 2000 senior executives across 13 countries about how they are planning for a genetic AI world. Why a genetic AI and why now?

Well, first of all there’s a large economic opportunity around AI. We forecast to be $16 trillion by 2030, and there’s about a trillion dollars that’s going to be spent in the area of AI over the next 12 months alone. So, every enterprise, every nation is investing in AI.

And when we say AI, there’s different types of AI. There’s generative AI, genetic AI, physical AI, and the time is now for that investment. You’re seeing it in the event today where many companies are making investments across the AI spectrum.

What is the data and AI sovereignty, and what happens when enterprises make it a mission-critical part of their strategy?

Well, to be able to actually run these intelligent applications, there is a need for a sovereign data and AI platform from EDB, Enterprise DB, our partners, NVIDIA, RedHat, and Supermicro. And with this new sovereign platform, we hope to deliver our customers the platform that they need to drive rapid innovation around these new AI applications.

Data sovereignty is gaining increased attention globally in the Middle East and the surrounding markets. How is EDB ensuring compliance, trust, and performance in your deployments?

Well, first of all, we’re finding that in this survey, it was very interesting, 95% of respondents are investing in a sovereign data and AI platform over the next three years.

And what they’re seeing is real benefits. They’re seeing two to three extra the velocity in terms of building out AI applications, and they’re seeing a five-fold increase in ROI. So, this is driving a lot of attention around this space.

Now, from an EDB perspective, we are delivering a standard sovereign data and AI platform that accelerates our customers to market. So, it’s a plug and play platform that resolves the security issues, compliance issues, and regulatory challenges that our customers have in a plug and play way.

How important is the UAE or the GCC region for EDB? Can you tell us about your corporate strategy in the GCC and how that aligns with the regional’s national agenda?

Well, what we found is that the biggest investments globally in sovereign data and AI are actually happening here in the region, in the UAE. There is a national vision that’s been set around open and around sovereign data and AI.

So, we’re very aligned in terms of our approach here. And the region, it’s very much like a Silicon Valley of sovereign data and AI, where there’s a lot of rich discussion around new use cases that our partners and our customers want to enable today versus tomorrow. So, it’s here and now in the region.

Looking ahead, six to 12 months from now, what is your message to the enterprises, governments, and other organizations who are considering or already on the AI journey?

I think in the next six to 12 months, focus on building your own sovereign data and AI platform. By doing this, it’s going to have a fivefold increase in your ROI and certainly increase your velocity to market.

But there is also, I think, a misconception. When we talk about sovereign, we talk about the benefit of secure, we talk about the benefit of compliance and regulatory requirements. Meeting those criteria, in some cases, can be viewed as slowing down the rate of innovations.

The opposite is true with our platform. By using a platform that has this capability built in, you’re able to accelerate your time to market.

How does EDB Postgres AI support data sovereignty in practice?

From a sovereign data and AI platform perspective, there are five key criteria that our customers need in the platform. One, open source based. This guarantees interoperability, access to talent, and it avoids vendor lock-in. This is something that even at a national level is important, open source based.

Second, the need to support multiple workloads, transactional, analytics, and AI workloads on one unified platform. Not three, but one. Third, there’s a need for a low-code, no-code application development environment. An environment that accelerates your time to market, an environment that democratizes AI for all.

So, you don’t have to be a developer, you can be a business decision maker and still create applications. Fourth, there needs to be a single pane glass view across the estate so you can monitor, secure, and drive compliance and meet those regulatory requirements across your entire estate. And then last, but by no means least, you need to be able to deploy in a hybrid fashion, meaning it’s not all about running workloads in the cloud.

You need to be able to run workloads on-prem, in the cloud, or in a dedicated system. So Sovereign is really those five things. It’s the ability to deploy in a hybrid manner.

It’s the ability to view your estate through a single pane of glass. It’s the ability to be able to run in a rich and dynamic low-code, no-code app environment, run multiple workloads, and of course, being open source.