AI Sovereignty Becomes Executive Strategy

Hi, everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong TV. Hey, my next guest is Logan Wolf.

Logan is a partner, Global AI Strategy and Sovereign Transformation over at Kyndryl. And this is a topic near and dear to me. I'm looking forward to discussing with Logan.

But first, let's welcome him to the show. Logan, thanks for coming on here. We appreciate it.

Alan, thank you. It's a pleasure. So, I gave people your title.

You're a partner at Kyndryl for Global AI Strategy and Sovereign Transformation. But give people a sense, Logan, of where you've been, how you got here. I've been around this space for about 16 years.

This space being AI and machine learning. That's sort of how I started some time ago. But then my career took me to general risk and compliance, and I have quite a bit of experience in digital forensics, regulatory compliance, particularly in highly regulated verticals, and that's finance, healthcare, governance, et cetera, public sector.

Right? And so these days, I think it's really sort of coming together with LLMs and the push towards repatriating workloads, AI, ML workloads, that is. And so really, it's a bit of both at this point.

Absolutely. How long are you with Kyndryl? I'm a pretty fresh face.

It's been since January, and I've been a founder CEO of one of my startups just prior to this. Oh, really? All right.

Very cool. I don't want to get too personal, but is the company Kyndryl acquired, or you left the startup to come here to Kyndryl? No, we did get acquired, however, not by Kyndryl.

I tend to oscillate between enterprise leadership and hands-on startup work. So that's usually how . I've done my share of each too, though mostly I will tell you, I like the startup world.

I stay in the enterprise as little as I can till I get the itch to go do another startup. But, well, I'm doing Techstrong now for 12, 13, actually 14 years, so it's still a startup to me, and I'm kind of comfortable there. But I've done that same kind of oscillation as you mentioned.

It's an interesting title, Global AI Strategy and Sovereign Transformation. Where is the overlap? Well, obviously, LLMs are a life and industry-changing technology these days, and I think there is a lot of general angst that lies around data, especially around these models as well as power and energy infrastructure.

So when it comes to data, we have sort of AI being proliferating into sensitive workflows and high criticality workflows in major enterprises. Right? And so where that inference data goes, training data goes, right, like essentially how these systems function, I think there is a lot of concern there from both regulatory perspective and competitive perspective.

Right? And again, when it comes to AI, power infrastructure, for example, so that's the build-out of data centers, chips, supply chains, in that regard. So these are massive projects.

These are critical infrastructure projects and sort of initiatives that are really key to the competitiveness and the industry competitiveness in particular countries especially. And so I think there's quite a bit of overlap these days we're seeing. Yeah.

Look, I've heard the term AI sovereignty. Mm-hmm. Right?

Where beyond digital sovereignty, just being able to have your own models or your own agentic infrastructure, and that is kind of the tip of the iceberg. Of course, I think below the water is the data centers and everything that goes with today's AI and tomorrow's AI type of working. Before we jump further into that, though, Logan, I wanted to just quickly, Kyndryl is a company, I think a lot of our audience has heard the name.

Of course, it was originally spun out of IBM. Right. Is the old IBM Global Services and other pieces of the IBM business that spun out as an independent entity.

And I remember covering it when it spun out. You don't get many startups that start with, like, a billion dollars or so in revenue or something like that, if I remember correctly what the number was. But that was a couple of years ago.

Now Kyndryl's been out for a few years and has really kind of put its own mark on the market and its own face on the brand. Just quickly for our audience, how would you describe Kyndryl and the best place to... or the best way to kind of wrap your head around all things Kyndryl does?

Well, it's pretty comprehensive, Alan. We are the world's largest IT infrastructure provider and operator by some margin, right in this space. And so needless to say, a very significant player.

Now, a large part of our business and expertise lies with mission-critical estates, right? And so operating infrastructure that's really critical to business, in many cases for large organizations and Fortune 500 organizations, obviously. Right?

And so you mentioned sort of startups and in the spin-out context. The spirit of innovation that we're applying to these operations is really very much alive, and that's why we are getting into the sovereignty space as well. We think that we have quite a bit of expertise in the space to help organizations make the transition.

Love it. With that out of the way, let's dive a little deeper into digital sovereignty. I was out in Prague I think it was the week of April 19th, SUSECON was there.

And SUSE is really a company, it started out as a Linux provider. Of course, they're much more now. But they're very deep in the whole digital sovereignty kind of movement.

And when you go to Europe, you see firsthand just how big digital sovereignty is over there. Not that it's a Europe-only movement or a Europe-only idea, right? I think what's interesting, digital sovereignty in the US tends to be vis-a-vis China, and digital sovereignty in Europe tends to be vis-a-vis the US and that's why, I guess, makes the world go round and round.

But it certainly moved from water cooler conversations to things that are being taken up at official levels. There's a lot of conferences going on. There's a lot of discussion at the EU government layer and so forth around this.

Talk to us about this sort of evolving nature or the whole movement. It's become a movement. It's no longer just some debate for academics.

It's definitely a practical trend at this point that, personally, I don't think is going to go away anytime soon. The ball is sort of rolling on that, and it's really many governments' and organizations' response to, let's say, a rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape. Right?

And so we're seeing some of the traditional trade relationships, some of the traditional supply chains really experiencing drastic changes. Right? And so if you further zoom out from, let's say, the Europe lens or the Canadian lens, for instance, and I happen to be in Canada, and I'm actually Austrian, so it's an interesting mix there.

But if you zoom out from an individual country level, really it's the desire to-- It's closely linked to resiliency, and so it's the desire- Yes ... to move to a place where you're able to continue to operate in a way that is as independent from foreign influence as possible, right? And so the way we view it at Kyndryl is actually through a lens of data operational and technology sovereignty.

And so the data lens is pretty straightforward, I suppose. It's where the data is, who can access it legally, who can move it, et cetera. Right?

This is closely linked to frameworks like GDPR, for instance, and it's quite well understood as a space. Operational sovereignty is the ability to continue operations independent of foreign disruptions, and that could be kill switches, for example, and other type of influence, right? And so, technological sovereignty, that's the trickiest space because it comes down to independence from foreign supply chains across, let's say, hardware and software.

Right? And in many cases, it involves deliberate trade-offs between, for example, innovation and sovereignty, just because of how concentrated geographically and nationally some of the cutting-edge technologies are these days. And so, I think a lot of organizations and governments really trying to find the right balance between the extremes across each of these three domains and between deliberate decisions.

Agreed. I think it's important. Look, this is a supply chain issue at its heart.

Right? And this whole supply chain thing, I think, really came to the forefront during COVID. Mm-hmm.

For a lot of reasons. And that wasn't just digital supply chains. That was physical supply chains, masks and supplies and so forth.

However, I think AI has put a whole different twist on it. Right? Certainly from a technology point of view.

I think geopolitically, it's a question of data privacy, where the EU, for instance, actually has a much more nuanced and mature view towards data privacy than maybe we do here in the US, where we have kind of a quilt patchwork of data privacy, depending on what state you're talking about, but certainly nothing on the federal level. So there is the data privacy issue. Then there's the technology issue, there's the AI issue.

These all go through it. I can't help but think that it's also very closely tied into open source. Right?

When we talk about freedom, my friend Ron Gula was the founder of Tenable Network Security- Mm-hmm ... security company. Nessus was something they started.

A founder. " And when we're talking about open source in light of sovereignty issues, it's the free as in freedom aspect of it, that no one is going to be able to pull the rug out from your supply chain. No one's going to be able to impose controls on what you can or cannot do with a piece of software or some technology.

And I saw my friend Andreas Printz, who is with SUSE, put out something on LinkedIn today. Over in Europe, they just had some conference. I think 120 companies signed on to make it a regulation over there that for any government-related contract or fulfillment, that you must look at open source before you look at proprietary software.

Now, at Kyndryl, that's obviously something you guys will have to take into consideration if something like that were to come true. But Kyndryl, I know for a fact, operates on, "Hey, we don't dictate what software you use. We don't dictate what technology you use.

" Kyndryl tries to support the widest possible frameworks of technology. How does this sovereignty issue affect that? It's a good question, and I'll also touch on open source, on the open source aspect- Go ahead ...

right. Yeah. And then I want to introduce a further sort of complexity across the energy space here.

Because it's becoming increasingly more relevant in the type of climate- Mm-hmm ... we're in. So, Kyndryl, one of the advantages we have is that we're a vendor-neutral operator.

And so ultimately, our job is to enable, I like to say, choice and optionality within the customer's infrastructure, so we can help them. Actually, we've recently launched an offering called Sovereignty Readiness Assessment. So this is something that's very pertinent to this, because we take a look at where does the organization stand, what options they can have to reach their sovereignty outcomes, what trade-offs they have, and we essentially recommend them a palette of options and a roadmap.

Which is very distinct, let's say, from something you could get from an organization that's very vendor specific. And I think open source provides a tremendous degree of optionality. It does come with, let's say, some degree of technical debt in some cases.

And again, that really harkens back to my point where there are trade-offs with every choice. And it's really a matter of what you're willing to live with. And to quickly touch on the energy aspect of things.

So you referred to some European movements. It could be the EU Tech Sovereignty Package and the Cloud and AI Development Act that was talked about and unveiled last week. Yeah.

Part of that is also the build-out of data centers and hardware infrastructure, and the repatriation of some of the workloads within the boundaries of specific countries. So these data centers, though, they come with significant energy decisions. And that's powering them, that's cooling them, obviously, and you got materials such as liquid natural gas, for example, coming into the picture here.

And it really then needs to harken back to the particular country's critical infrastructure and energy infrastructure. Because the question is, what are going to be the costs of that transition, and what are going to be the implications on the national grid? Do we need to invest in energy?

And in this case, should the energy be sovereign, or should we, let's say, be forming relationships with trusted partners still? And if so, who these trusted partners are. And it really opens a can of worms.

And it's, again, one of the things that Kyndryl is looking to help our customers with is take all of these factors into consideration when making these decisions. Absolutely. The geopolitical aspect of it is, what's a good word to use?

Daunting. Because things are changing so quickly day to day on the ground. Today's rivals, tomorrow's partner.

Tomorrow's partner, who knows? And with wars going on around the world and so forth, it's difficult to say the least. I wrote an article, it's coming out tomorrow.

Elon Musk just released the first spec for these low Earth orbit data centers he wants to put up there. Basically the size of a 747 wingspan. Still measured, I think, in kilowatts, not megawatts.

But China just announced an undersea data center that's powered by a wind turbine farm on top of the sea right near the data center. Certainly, we're going literally from the bottom of the ocean up to space. The whole spectrum, trying to figure out this data center and energy issue.

And to me, this is the crux of it. I think we are acknowledging that AI has the potential to be so disruptive, not just in tech, disruptive of our whole civilization, that we need, number one, to have sovereign control over it for all of our individual nations. Number two, we need to figure out the energy cooling, the whole infrastructure piece of this.

And there's probably more than one answer to it, but it's certainly just building huge data centers the size of Manhattan in rural areas may not be the right answer. May be part of the equation, though, but who knows? And then the AI technology itself, what is that going to wrought on people's jobs and livelihoods?

And do we need to go to some kind of basic income, universal basic income or something? The issues are too big for many companies themselves to wrap around. It's good to have a partner like Kyndryl that has a worldwide presence, that has that sort of scale to look.

Because these are big issues, Logan. " Which, for most of my career, was the only question we asked about data centers. But this is the world we find ourselves in.

Certainly. And it does take expertise, obviously, and that's how we work with our clients and customers as well. And it's both across consult.

Really, we help customers to both complete that transformation, but also then to operate sort of 24/7 and maintain continuous view of how the world is changing, how that affects their operations, and how they can, again, reach the sovereignty objectives in the context of this conversation. To your point, the world is a complex place. It's not getting any simpler, it seems.

Even through the lens that you've mentioned, we have the potential emergence of commercially available quantum computing. We have- We didn't even talk about that. Yeah.

There are upcoming energy breakthroughs, potentially, in the fusion efficient spaces. Yeah. So all of these can have dramatic implications on how governments see their resources, how they see their workforce, their citizens, and their competitiveness on the global stage.

And so we're here to help our customers navigate that. I love it. Hey, we're almost out of time.

I could talk about this with you all day. To tell you the truth, I am very interested in it. But for our audience out here, maybe who says, "Boy, I'd like a smart person, a smart partner to work with on these things," what's their best kind of on-ramp to Kyndryl?

So in this space, a great place to start is the sovereignty readiness assessment I was referring to. It's a relatively quick engagement. It's just a few weeks, but ultimately, the results are dramatic and impressive because, again, this gives organizations the perspective of where they stand on sovereignty.

And my view on this as a tech leader is you always need to know sort of where you stand before you're figuring out how you can get to sort of point B. Right? So it does get them that clarity on the lens of data, on operations, on technology, and then we help them put together that roadmap.

And again, through our iCommand and our expertise in managing mission-critical estates, we can actually then help them execute that roadmap. So that's really sort of an end-to-end journey, and it's a good starting point. com, right?

Quite. All right. Hey, Logan, I want to thank you for coming on here today.

We've got people in the waiting room for our next interview who are ready. But keep up the great work. This is important.

This is important stuff we're talking about. And we need people who are really sharp, thinking about it, working on it, and frankly, we need companies, I think, like Kyndryl, that are vendor neutral, but that have the scale to really look at these big pictures, these big questions, and not get hung up on the individual silos, if you will. Come back and keep us posted on what you're doing and what you guys are thinking.

I thank you very much for coming on. Thanks for having me, Alan. All right.

Logan Wolf, Partner at Kyndryl for Global AI Strategy and Sovereign Transformation. We're going to take a break here on Techstrong TV. We're going to be back in a moment with our next guest.