How Data Wallets Can Unlock the Potential of Personal AI
Last month, Apple unveiled its entry into the ongoing AI race: Apple Intelligence, a system that uses generative AI to enhance users’ experiences on the iPhone. The announcement notably focused on how Apple can preserve privacy while using AI tools, which often can lead to greater risks for personal data. Although Apple is certainly taking steps in the right direction when it comes to processing user data and asking for informed consent, the Apple Intelligence announcement opens up a wider conversation about how to unlock the true potential of personal AI agents.
When unveiling its technology, Apple emphasized how it would keep user data secure while using AI tools. When possible, processing will be done on iPhones themselves rather than being sent to a data center, where there is a greater chance of a data breach. For requests that require more power, Apple has created a private cloud network for off-device processing that Apple itself would be unable to access.
Apple also announced a partnership with OpenAI, which will handle more complex requests that Apple’s own AI system cannot process. Users would have to explicitly consent to using OpenAI, meaning that they are fully aware of who is providing the answers and how data is being processed.
Limitations in Data Discovery and Processing
Apple’s announcement represents an exciting step forward in AI for personal use, and in ensuring that AI tools are being used safely. However, limitations in how data is currently stored today—not just at Apple, but across most organizations—mean that Apple’s AI agent is still siloed and limited to a few common use cases.
The power of Apple Intelligence emerges from its use in a personal context—the tool can look through your emails and messages and synthesize information for you, or even generate ideas or content on your behalf. However, the data Apple can process is limited to the data that is stored about you on your device—the AI agent would be far more powerful if it could use personal data from other contexts, such as financial data, medical data, or shopping history.
Apple does have a mechanism for using additional context to inform AI outputs—namely, sending the query to OpenAI—but this tool uses world knowledge gleaned from scraping the web, and doesn’t offer any way to use selected personal data for additional context. As a result, the quality and scope of data used by Apple and OpenAI is limited.
Although Apple employs some basic consent mechanisms for having OpenAI process a request, users can only opt in or out of such a service: They cannot give granular consent in which some data can be used and other data cannot.
A New Approach: Interoperable Data Wallets
The limitations in the capabilities of Apple’s AI technology emerge not from the organization itself, but in foundational gaps in today’s data practices and infrastructures in both businesses and governments. By coupling data with applications, organizations limit their view into a consumer and are only able to provide services based on what data that organization has collected.
Instead of creating an AI agent limited to one organization—and thus limited to a few services—organizations should invest in interoperable data wallets. These wallets allow for data to be reused across devices, applications and businesses, and unlock new value for both individuals and organizations. With an interoperable data wallet, an AI agent could access all of a user’s data across a number of services, and make informed recommendations from booking reservations, filling out forms, or sharing medical history with a trusted provider.
The key to interoperable data wallets is standardizing the underlying protocols, data models and interfaces. Solid—a W3C standard invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web—can enable and support this new data paradigm. The Solid protocol is already laying the foundation for interoperable data wallets and secure data sharing, and is powering a data model that is beneficial for organizations and individuals alike.
