Governance of data has taken a centre stage with the GDPR and similar regimes coming up across jurisdictions as businesses realized the real potential of data as an asset capable of enhancing business value across sectors.

Gone are the days of treating data merely within the realm of databases and data processing making way for analysis of datato ehance and predict customer decision-making.

GDPR has prompted considerable discussion on the need for governance and end to end management of data handling including data flow, data sharing, data analysis and use by businesses, to, on the one hand ensure that the data delivers best business value and on the other hand to ensure that businesses don’t stand on the wrong side of data protection regimes in different jusrisdictions.

On legal aspects, Data Governance audits and Privacy Impact audits are the steps to begin with to verify data security including sovereignty over data, prevention of and imminent handling of data breaches and ownership & licensing of data to verify the quality of data management by businesses.

By 2020, the number of persons using internet is expected to be 5 billion with an estimated 50 billion “things” on internet on offer to be used.The very enorminity and pressures of scalability has been pushing businesses to look up toinnovation &Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) to enhance efficiency and competitive strategy to be sustainable in the marketplace.

Success of AI and strategic advantages to businesses rests largely on being trusted and accepted by customers/stakeholders to enable AI to be embeded deeper in the value chain. Consequently, trust and acceptance of AI is also copntingent onbeing able to allign governance and management of data & AI with ethical and social value systems in addition to the compliance with applicable legal regime across jusrisdictions.

In this regard, it will be imperative to ensure that AI is as accountable as businesses or any other stakeholders in the data governance & Trust and ethics space. Questions such as what principles be applied on data embeded or used by any AI, failing which, the use of such data by AI in contravention of legal or ethical boundaries could throw up legal and acceptability challenges apart from isolating busineeses from stakeholders. As these challenges mature over time, data protection/privacy impact assessment audits by our Data Protection/AI desk has been supporting businesses put in place legal & regulatory best practices on data governances and the ethics of AI.

However, a far deeper discussion and norm setting is necessary globally regarding a uniform standard for ethics of AI and data governance sincedata and its use in AI impacts businesses “ease of doing business” across jurisdictions