Tony Meredith

When the information is wrong, people get hurt. I learned that over seventeen years as an RAF Intelligence Officer, across imagery intelligence, targeting, force protection and special operations, at unit, headquarters and joint command level. Every decision rested on whether the record beneath it could be found and trusted. I spent the following decade at Barclays turning that lesson into practice. I ran security and data change inside a Board endorsed £163mil portfolio, and as Technology Chief Data Officer I owned the data agenda across the bank's technology estate and answered for it in front of internal audit, the Group CDO and the regulators. Banks are where you find out what a record is worth when someone with authority asks for it. Today I am Director of Digital Transformation and VP Global Government Affairs at Global Relay, where we hold the communications records of regulated industries. I built our public sector practice from a blank sheet across Canada, the US, the EU and the UK, wrote The Data Layer, our sovereign data proposition to the Government of Canada, and lead engagement from ministers and deputy ministers through to CTOs and chief architects. My position is a simple one. Every layer of the sovereign AI stack now has named suppliers except the one that matters most: the governed, authoritative record that AI will reason over, that citizens will ask to see, and that institutions will have to produce under pressure. Sovereignty is a question of control over that record, not of where a server sits. That is the layer I work on, and it is what I write about here.