The book · March 2026 · with Vinod Bijlani
Own Your AI
The Sovereign Stack Playbook for Nations and Enterprises.
The book that defined the Sovereignty Test: a four-dimension test of whether an AI system is sovereign, with six statements and a score out of 30. Written for ministers and their programme offices, boards, CIOs and CISOs, and the architects who build what they sign off on.
01The argument
Not against the cloud. Not for self-sufficiency.
Sovereign AI is sold as a place: a region, a data centre, a chip with the right flag. The book treats it as a question of control. A tenancy you control, with your keys, your choice of model, your update schedule and a tested path to leave, can pass the test inside a hyperscaler. A subscription you cannot leave fails it in your own data centre. The goal is managing dependencies, not eliminating them.
Case studies draw on national programmes and enterprise deployments in Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, India and Indonesia.
02The frameworks
- 1
The Sovereignty Test
Four dimensions of control: legal, operational, technical and strategic. A system passes only on all four. Named the Control Test in the first printing.
- 2
The Sovereignty Maturity Index
Six statements scored one to five, a number out of 30, four bands from fully dependent to fully autonomous. A bank that had done everything its regulator asked scores 14.
- 3
The Three Pillars
Data, compute and model, and why a programme that secures one and rents the other two is not sovereign.
- 4
Dual-zone architectures and GPU economics
A controlled core and an elastic edge without giving the keys to the edge, and what the compute actually costs a nation or an enterprise.
- 5
Open-weight licensing and agentic AI security
Where open weights give control and where their licences take it back; what changes when the software acts rather than answers.
- 6
The 90-day roadmap and the Sovereignty Certificate
From a 14 to a 19 without rebuilding everything, and the evidence pack a regulator or a board can read.
03Details
| Title | Own Your AI: The Sovereign Stack Playbook for Nations and Enterprises |
|---|---|
| Authors | Prem Naraindas and Vinod Bijlani |
| Published | 11 March 2026, Kindle and paperback, 269 pages |
| Where | Amazon (ASIN B0GS7C6DN4) and ownaistack.com |
| Cite | Naraindas, P. and Bijlani, V. (2026). Own Your AI: The Sovereign Stack Playbook for Nations and Enterprises. Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. |
| Readers | The Sovereignty Maturity Index assessment tool, the 90-day roadmap and the Sovereignty Certificate checklist are available on request: hello@premnaraindas.com. An honest review on Amazon, good or bad, is the most useful thing you can do for the next reader. |
04The earlier book
April 2025 · with Ahmed Sulaiman, Takween AI
Building an AI Center of Excellence
From Strategy to Implementation. Twelve chapters in five parts: foundations, strategy, operating model, governance including ISO/IEC 42001, and scaling. Written before the sovereign-AI programmes it later informed, it is the operating-model companion to Own Your AI: the test tells you where you stand, the centre of excellence is how an organisation moves.
The download is being moved to this site. Until then, request a copy at hello@premnaraindas.com.