By Jelani Harper – To the general populace, the social repercussions of AI (bias, explainability, and transparency) are the most relevant factors for determining how widely it should be deployed in everything from law enforcement to healthcare.

For the contemporary enterprise, another conversation has quietly emerged which, although perhaps not as righteous as that pertaining to social responsibility, remains pressing in pure business terms.

Not every organization is large or privileged enough to staff its own team of data scientists, especially with the ubiquity of third-party vendors and SaaS options for AI. This begs the question: when outsourcing the creation and deployment of AI models, who owns the intellectual property—the company paying for them or the vendors supporting them?

Typically, the answer falls within the bounds of the latter which, in several instances, can severely circumscribe the applications, creativity, and revenues associated with AI. According to Vizru CEO Ramesh Mahalingam, “Enterprises are now starting to say: I want to own the model that I design. I want to own the bot that actually delivers these models. I don’t want to just tap into somebody’s service. The entire stack of how this is being built is something that I want to own.” Read more: