Incentivising access to proprietary data can solve AI model quality concerns: Experts

There is a growing interest among IT professionals to embrace artificial intelligence (AI) technology, however, concerns about data quality, infrastructure readiness, and security and privacy, are proving to be a major hindrance.

As per a report by IT management firm, SolarWinds – less than 40% of the professionals said that they trust the quality of data used in developing AI technologies. “While talk of AI has dominated the industry, IT leaders and teams recognise the outsize risks of the still-developing technology, heightened by the rush to build AI quickly rather than smartly,” said Krishna Sai, SVP, of Technology and Engineering at SolarWinds.

Access to quality data can be solved by incentivising sharing of proprietary data from public and private data. A whitepaper by EY, released on Thursday, suggests that AI development in India through data access can be done by developing institutions and mechanisms to promote sharing of proprietary data. 

"Access to proprietary datasets will be a key differentiating factor between countries that emerge as winners and those that are unable to leverage the AI opportunity. The government's proactive role in establishing data frameworks, along with the private sector's participation in data sharing and standardisation, will be pivotal in creating a robust AI ecosystem,” said Rajnish Gupta, Partner, Tax and Economic Policy Group, EY India.

Further, the EY whitepaper highlights significant challenges such as privacy and confidentiality concerns, lack of clarity around data ownership, lack of interoperability between AI system/data and more importantly, generation of large volumes of synthetic data should be resolved to facilitate easier data access and foster AI innovation in India.

Towards this, the report highlights initiatives that the government can take, which include establishing institutional capacity and governance; developing a privacy framework; access to non-personal/private sector data through marketplaces or data exchanges; and making government data available. Further, businesses can leverage data-driven strategies by standardising and securing existing data.