The Seven-Day Question Every CDO Must Answer

On Sept. 3, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and xAI’s Grok went down within hours of one another. Each company pointed to a different cause. OpenAI cited a routing error, Anthropic an unexplained infrastructure issue and xAI a failure at its Memphis compute facility. That made three providers and three separate failures in a single day. For any business that runs work through these tools, the outage raised three critical questions. Which workflows stopped? Who owned the backup plan? And did anyone know the dependency existed?

The numbers suggest few executives can answer that last question with confidence. “The Calculus of AI Sovereignty” is a survey of 1,000 senior executives by the IBM Institute for Business Value and Oxford Economics. In it, only 9% said they have an excellent understanding of their AI dependencies. Seventy-one percent said switching their primary AI vendor or model would be difficult today. And 81% said a seven-day outage at that vendor would be severe or critical, enough to halt business operations. That is the seven-day question: If your main AI provider went dark for a week, what would keep running?

IBM argues that answering it takes more than knowing where your data is stored. It takes control. On its digital sovereignty page, the company defines sovereignty across five layers: data, AI, software operations, infrastructure and technology. The test at each layer is simple. Can you move your data, swap your models and shift your workloads without being locked to one vendor?

IBM’s answer is IBM Sovereign Core, which the company pitches as “sovereignty with receipts.” In other words, it is software built to show proof of compliance continuously, not as a one-time snapshot. The IBM study also puts a number on what control is worth. Organizations with the most control across their AI stack protect 55% more operating profit from AI-driven disruption than those with less.

To see how analysts rate the technologies behind sovereignty claims, download Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Digital Sovereignty, which maps those technologies by maturity.

For CDOs, control starts with data. IBM’s Oct. 14 webinar for data leaders, “Context Is the Constraint: The Real-Time Data Foundation,” covers that layer directly. Register for the webinar.

Image credit: iStockphoto/metamorworks