Sven Berckmoes, Solutions & Alliances Lead, TD SYNNEX Maverick
Over the past year, I’ve had countless conversations with partners about AI. They almost always begin in the same place: how do we help customers adopt it, which solutions should we be leading with, and where are the commercial opportunities?
Increasingly, though, those conversations are ending with questions that don’t appear on a product datasheet. Who owns the data? Can AI-generated content be trusted? What happens if AI gets something wrong? And ultimately, who’s responsible for the outcome?
They’re not easy questions, but that’s precisely why they’re becoming some of the most important conversations partners will have. As trusted advisors, we need to be ready for those conversations, not because customers expect us to have all the answers, but because they rightly expect us to help them navigate the complexity.
For the past two years, we’ve been fascinated by what AI can do. As organisations begin deploying it at scale, the conversation is naturally broadening. Capability remains essential, but it’s now sharing the stage with questions around governance, accountability, intellectual property, security and trust.
That’s a significant shift for our industry because responsibility isn’t something you can install alongside a software licence.
The ownership myth
Take ownership for example. At first glance, it feels like a straightforward question. An organisation adopts an AI platform, rolls it out across the business and quickly begins to realise the benefits. It would be easy to assume ownership comes with deployment. In reality, it doesn’t. Organisations don’t own the AI itself; they licence access to it. So perhaps ownership isn’t about the technology at all. Perhaps it’s about the data instead.
After all, AI is only as valuable as the information it can access. Every organisation has spent years building documents, proposals, designs, presentations and an enormous amount of institutional knowledge. Increasingly, that’s becoming the foundation for AI to deliver meaningful results.
It’s one of the reasons I’m seeing so many conversations move beyond technology and towards data readiness. Partners are helping customers think about permissions, information architecture and governance in ways they simply weren’t twelve months ago. AI has accelerated the importance of getting those fundamentals right because even the most capable tools depend on trustworthy, well-managed information. In many ways, AI is exposing challenges that were already there. Poor data governance didn’t suddenly become a problem because of AI; AI has simply made it impossible to ignore.
Then there’s intellectual property. If AI helps create a customer proposal, writes marketing copy or generates a presentation, who owns the finished piece of work? The organisation? The individual who prompted it? The platform itself? The answers aren’t always black and white, and customers know it.
Perhaps the biggest shift of all, however, is accountability. AI is incredibly good at generating answers. It can summarise meetings, analyse documents and produce content in seconds, and while the results are often incredibly insightful, they’re not infallible. AI can be confidently wrong, and when that happens it can’t take responsibility for the decisions that follow. That still sits firmly with people.
I think this is where many organisations are asking the wrong question. Instead of asking, Who owns AI?, we should be asking, Who owns the outcome? It’s a subtle difference, but an important one.
Who’s really responsible?
Customers rarely ask who owns the collaboration platform they’re deploying. Increasingly, though, they’re asking who is responsible for AI, looking for reassurance that their data is protected, their governance is robust and the technology is being used in a way that aligns with their business. Those are conversations built on trust as much as technology.
For partners, that’s a real opportunity. For years, success has often been measured by helping customers select, deploy and support the right technology. AI expands that role as customers still need the technology, but they also need guidance: help preparing their data, establishing governance, defining policies and creating confidence across their organisation.
So, who owns AI? In truth, nobody owns it in the way we traditionally think about technology. What organisations do own, however, is the responsibility for how AI is governed, how it’s used and the outcomes it helps create. For partners, helping customers navigate that responsibility may become every bit as valuable as the technology itself.
Sven Berckmoes, Solutions & Alliances Lead, TD SYNNEX Maverick
