Dell executive: governments must build AI governance in from day one
In an iThome report, Dell Technologies Taiwan technical vice president Li Baifei argued that governments pursuing sovereign AI should adopt "governance by design," embedding controls, auditing and risk management into data, compute, model and policy decisions from the start rather than retrofitting data permissions, security and compliance after launch. Citing an IDC survey sponsored by Dell and NVIDIA, "Building a Sovereign AI Foundation for Government" (258 government IT decision-makers), he said 58% rank strong sovereign data governance, quality and control among the most critical sovereign AI platform requirements, and 71% of government leaders expect agentic AI to accelerate government AI adoption. He also called for a verifiable trust chain running from a silicon root of trust through supply chain, hardware, deployment and inference, and stressed that open-source models do not by themselves deliver transparency, security or sovereignty — control is what matters.
Government AI projects often stall at the pilot stage; building governance in from the start will shape whether agentic AI can be deployed accountably in public services.