Trust as infrastructure: Securing collaboration in the AI era

Building trusted infrastructure for secure AI collaboration.

Organisations are looking to artificial intelligence (AI) to automate processes and deliver an improvement in productivity and therefore profitability. This will require an enterprise infrastructure that is secure and ensures collaboration between people and AI agents is secure.

Healthcare, retail, and insurance sectors rely on high levels of collaboration and must have the highests levels of information security and service integrity, as all three manage vital information from their customers and patients. Digital leaders from retailer The Cooperative, insurance services firm Crawford & Company, and the Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust joined network services and security provider Cisco on the HotTopics The Studio stage to debate trust, infrastructure and collaboration in the AI era.

Mark Rankin, Cisco Distinguished Solutions Engineer, talked about the importance of trust for organisations in a challenging business environment, and the importance of knowing not just who is providing you service but how and where data is processed . Mollie Brentnall, Crawford & Company Director of IT, added that in her experience, and especially within insurance the business needs to be able to verify all its data, and especially outcomes generated by AI.

The panel discussed how in all of their sectors, AI has become embedded in everyday workflows, so collaboration platforms have evolved into environments where decisions are shaped and knowledge is generated. This shift has raised a fundamental question for them as digital leaders, which is, how do they trust the systems where critical business decisions are now being made?

All agreed, one of the greatest challenges is that information moves faster than at any time before. The modern era of business and technology means that boundaries are less defined. Employees work remotely, and the supply chain of both digital and physical services is global. As a result, the risks of cybersecurity exposure have increased dramatically. Just as organisations are utilising AI to increase productivity, so too are those that mean the organisation harm. The panel shared insights into how they have seen AI used for the manipulation of the truth and how the chances of a loss of control are higher.

Despite the risks AI has created, digital leaders are being tasked with enabling speed, innovation, and better decision-making across the organisation with AI, networks, and the existing digital estate. Jeffrey Wood, Deputy ICT Director at the Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust in Harlow, Essex, said the National Health Service is behind in some areas of technology adoption, and there is an advantage to this, as the digital leader and his team can leap frog to the latest technologies.

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