Aventail^™ helps shape Project SAIL’s roadmap for the UK’s sovereign AI future

22 October 2026 — Aventail^™ has contributed to the discussions behind Project SAIL: Mobilising the Nation, bringing the perspective of a UK company building technology to give organisations control over where their AI runs.

Joseph Ward, Aventail^™’s co-founder and CEO, participated in Project SAIL’s policy workshop on 23 July. The event brought together more than 30 participants from industry, start-ups, civil society and policy to examine the UK’s AI priorities. Those discussions helped inform the taskforce’s final analysis and recommendations.

Published today, the report proposes a “Prosperity Compact for the Nation”: a coordinated approach in which government and business share responsibility for turning AI ambition into practical deployment.

Download Project SAIL: Mobilising the Nation (PDF, 6.4 MB)

Bringing deployment experience into the sovereignty debate

For Aventail^™, the discussion connects directly to the challenges its platform is designed to address: enabling organisations to use AI with sensitive data, control their processing destinations and reduce dependence on a single provider.

Aventail^™ combines a built-in inference engine, model deployment and policy-based routing. Organisations can run supported models on their own devices, servers and private cloud, and use approved external AI providers where their policies allow. Routing decisions are evaluated within the runtime, applying the organisation’s rules before selecting a permitted destination.

That gives the sovereignty debate a practical focus: which models can process a request, where that processing happens, and which alternatives an organisation can use when its requirements or available services change.

From national ambition to practical capability

Project SAIL’s ten recommendations include support for mid-sized data-centre capacity, a clearer definition of sovereign AI, wider access to compute, and stronger security and resilience arrangements for AI-dependent public services.

These priorities resonate with Aventail^™’s work across enterprises and compute providers: helping organisations deploy useful AI within approved boundaries, while making infrastructure easier to access and operate.

Project SAIL was convened by Rigby Group and chaired by its CEO, Steve Rigby. Zinc Innovation Partners produced the report and provided the taskforce’s secretariat. Its membership includes leaders from Microsoft, NVIDIA, BT, Cisco and other organisations across the UK technology sector.

Download the full report or explore Project SAIL.

About Aventail^™

Aventail^™, formerly Locai, is a UK AI inference platform founded in May 2025 and a graduate of Google AI First. It combines model execution, deployment and routing so organisations can control where inference runs across approved hardware and external AI providers.

Media enquiries: media@aventail.co.uk