The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) has ushered in a new era of technological progress, offering a spectrum of benefits across industries. AI’s potential to revolutionize operations, enhance decision-making and drive innovation is undeniable. The advantages of AI are numerous and impactful, from predictive analytics that refine strategies, to natural language processing that fuels customer interactions and assists users in their daily tasks, to assistive tools that enhance accessibility, communication and independence for people with disabilities.
“AI is driving a revolution in education, accessibility and productivity. For enterprises dealing with sensitive information, it is vital to maintain state-of-the-art data security in order to reap the rewards,” says Stuart Winter, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder at Lacero Platform Limited, Jamworks and Guardian.
However, as AI services find a home in cloud platforms, the issue of data confidentiality takes center stage. Cloud-hosted AI services demand the transfer of sensitive information to external servers, which can raise questions about data ownership, jurisdiction and control. The global nature of cloud providers introduces a complex web of compliance challenges as data protection laws differ across regions. This can lead to compromised data security, potential breaches and an erosion of control over proprietary information.
The conundrum of reaping AI benefits while safeguarding data confidentiality necessitates a holistic strategy. Organizations must conduct meticulous due diligence on the legal landscapes of the cloud providers’ operational jurisdictions, ensuring alignment with data protection regulations. Robust encryption, granular access controls and privacy-preserving techniques become imperative to counter the risks of unauthorized data access and use. Transparent agreements with cloud providers (outlining data handling practices and ownership) can also provide a pathway to more secure and compliant AI implementation.
In essence, the promise of AI’s transformational potential coexists with the challenge of data confidentiality, especially within cloud-hosted environments. Striking the right balance demands an approach that embraces regulatory nuances while implementing stringent security protocols. By navigating this complex terrain, organizations can harness AI’s capabilities while upholding the integrity and confidentiality of their data.
Jamworks ensures the confidentiality of data when leveraging AI
Jamworks AI is a powerful notetaking and productivity tool that records, transcribes, summarizes and generates meaningful insights from meetings, conversations and lectures. Having worked with AI for around four years, the Jamworks team is convinced that the technology has the power to transform the way we study and work, providing benefits to people with disabilities and neurodivergent people (as long as the technology is implemented securely and responsibly).
Jamworks has two core products: Jamworks for Education and Jamworks for Business. Jamworks for Education turns lectures into interactive, engaging and accessible study materials, such as a perfectly formatted set of notes, an interactive deck of flashcards and a personalized AI tutor trained on each class. These features are engaging for all students, but they are essential for those who experience obstacles to learning, such as ADHD, dyslexia or hearing impairment. Automated notetaking empowers students to focus and “be present in the moment” during classes, while interactive study materials and personalized chatbots encourage students to learn and explore topics in new and exciting ways. Importantly, the lecturer is able not only to view the output of the AI, but also to adjust this output and fine-tune it. This ensures that students can trust the output in front of them.
Jamworks for Business records in-person and online meetings, automatically highlights key sections and generates action items to ensure no important information is lost. Additionally, users can ask questions against meeting transcripts to refresh their memories and review what was discussed in a simple and conversational way. Like their educational product, Jamworks for Business offers major timesaving and productivity benefits to all employees, but it can be particularly useful for team members with disabilities or neurodivergent team members, who require assistive technology. Jamworks for Business is also useful to the employers who are legally obliged to provide assistive technology.
Clearly, AI has the potential to improve the lives of millions of people, but organizations dealing with acutely sensitive data may need specific assurances that their data is secure. From information discussed on an earnings call to personal health data, it is critical that information stays confidential and protected against cyberattacks.
Privacy-enhancing technologies deliver solutions
Confidential computing emerges as a robust solution to tackle the data privacy challenges that accompany the adoption of cloud-based AI Services or AI models leveraging the scale of cloud environments.
By leveraging technologies such as hardware-based enclaves, sensitive data remains encrypted and isolated during processing, effectively preventing unauthorized access even within the cloud infrastructure. This approach enhances data confidentiality by ensuring that only authorized parties possess the necessary decryption keys (or the complete application is running within a secure execution environment), so it cannot be accessed at all.
Furthermore, confidential computing safeguards data integrity by allowing computations to occur within secure enclaves, shielding them from potential tampering. As a result, organizations can confidently adopt AI in the cloud, knowing that their valuable data remains confidential, intact and immune to breaches, thus paving the way for the responsible and secure utilization of advanced AI technologies.
How to protect data with full authority at rest, in transit and in use
Protecting sensitive data requires a holistic approach including computing, containers, databases and encryption. The key is controlling access to the data and providing a way to securely process unencrypted data. It’s important to have technical assurance that only you have access to and control over your data and to ensure your cloud service operators can’t access the data or keys. The protection of these data states with technical assurance is complementary and doesn’t supersede or replace the other existing protections.
Technical assurance delivers the highest level of privacy and protection
Operational assurance means your cloud provider will not access your data based on trust, visibility and control. Technical assurance makes certain your cloud provider cannot access your data based on technical proof, data encryption and runtime isolation. It can also protect your CI/CD pipeline from bad actors.
Hyper protect your sensitive data and workloads in the cloud
IBM’s capabilities include industry-leading security services for cloud data, digital assets and workloads. They’re built on IBM® LinuxONE security-rich enclaves, which offer built-in protection for data at rest and in flight, plus protection of data in use. The services are designed to make it easy for application developers to build applications that deal with highly sensitive data while helping companies meet regulatory compliance requirements.
IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Services protect data in all stages of the data lifecycle
These services enable enterprises to have complete authority over their sensitive data, workloads and encryption keys, while benefitting from the latest cloud-native technology. Not even IBM Cloud administrators have access. IBM Hyper Protect Crypto Services provides Keep Your Own Key, so that data at rest and in transit can be encrypted with keys solely controlled by the cloud user and managed efficiently and securely. IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Virtual Server for VPC allows the adoption of state-of-the-art container technologies while completely isolating the runtime to protect against bad actors, including the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Admin or Kubernetes Admin. This enables the deployment of AI in containers with the technical assurance of no unauthorized access to the sensitive data proceeded by the AI model or any harmful misconfiguration of the AI model through tamper-proofness of the runtime, based on hardware but delivered as a service.
Jamworks builds a confidential AI service with IBM Hyper Protect Platform
In the age of data-driven decision-making, the adoption of AI holds immense promise for industries ranging from healthcare to finance. However, this adoption has been notably slower in regulated, IP-driven and data-sensitive industries. The primary concern centers around data privacy and security, often seen as a significant barrier to integrating AI into these sectors. By leveraging confidential compute, organizations in regulated, IP-driven and data-sensitive industries can harness the power of AI while ensuring robust safeguards for their data.
Confidential AI, enabled by confidential compute, offers innovative solutions to safeguard privacy, prevent data breaches and maintain compliance with regulatory requirements. Confidential AI can have several positive societal impacts in these sectors, including improved patient outcomes in healthcare, enhanced IP protection for innovative industries and heightened security in financial services. Overall, confidential AI has the potential to be a transformative force, bridging the gap between data privacy and AI adoption, and addressing the unique needs of regulated, IP-driven and data-sensitive industries in a way that positively impacts society.
This is why Jamworks for Business is partnering with IBM Hyper Protect to build confidential AI. The collaboration aims to protect the integrity of Jamworks’ AI (as well as the confidentiality of an individual’s data) with the help of privacy-enhancing technologies delivered through IBM Hyper Protect Services to achieve confidential AI. Hyper protecting Jamworks AI will empower employees at security-conscious organizations to benefit from the recent developments in generative AI. Sensitive information stays confidential to meet data privacy needs, while AI and AI-powered services boost efficiency and productivity to support business leaders and individuals.
Learn more about complete data privacy and protection
