EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Our policy on data privacy and protection reflects our fundamental commitment to evidence-based practice by implementing the highest standards of information protection to safeguard client interests while enabling rigorous evidence-based research across international operations. Our innovative nested classification system prioritizes client-interest sensitivity over predetermined categorical schemes, ensuring that protection measures are calibrated to the actual potential impact on specific client objectives rather than subject matter classifications, while simultaneously accommodating mandatory government and regulatory requirements through enhanced protections that supplement rather than replace our client-focused approach.

The comprehensive protection framework integrates technical safeguards including industry-standard encryption and access controls, procedural safeguards encompassing need-to-know principles and secure communications, and physical safeguards covering facility security and device protection, all proportionate to information sensitivity and regulatory requirements. Technology integration governance ensures that our advanced analytical capabilities, including AI-assisted research tools and automated processing systems, maintain data protection standards throughout the research lifecycle while supporting our evidence-based methodology, complemented by rigorous vendor management that extends our protection standards across the entire technology supply chain.

International operations are supported by appropriate cross-border data transfer mechanisms and multi-jurisdictional compliance frameworks that address regulatory requirements across UAE, UK, and other relevant jurisdictions, while our client relationship model balances transparency about protection measures and incident management with clear expectations for client cooperation in implementing enhanced security procedures where required, all underpinned by systematic data lifecycle management, comprehensive incident response capabilities, and continuous improvement processes that maintain the highest standards of professional service.

I. Policy Foundation

This policy flows from our philosophy and principles on research quality and standards. Our commitment to evidence-based practice requires the highest standards of data protection to preserve the integrity and authenticity of information while protecting client interests.

Our data protection approach prioritizes client-interest sensitivity, recognizing that protection requirements derive from potential impact on client objectives rather than predetermined categorical classifications.

II. Data Classification

Our approach to information protection is calibrated to the potential impact of disclosure on specific client interests rather than predetermined subject matter categories, ensuring that protection measures are proportionate to actual business risk and client needs. Where client information is subject to government or regulatory requirements, additional protections supplement our base client-interest classifications to ensure comprehensive compliance across all applicable frameworks and jurisdictions. This graduated protection system ensures appropriate technical, procedural, and physical safeguards for information ranging from internal use materials to ultra-sensitive client data requiring the highest levels of security and confidentiality.

III. Protection Framework

Our comprehensive protection framework employs industry-standard encryption, access controls, and monitoring capabilities proportionate to information sensitivity and regulatory requirements, ensuring complete protection of data in transit, at rest, and during processing activities. This technical foundation is supported by need-to-know access principles, secure communication procedures, and comprehensive staff training on data protection requirements appropriate to personnel roles and access levels. Physical safeguards, including controlled facility access, secure storage solutions, and device protection measures, ensure comprehensive information security across all operational environments and client engagement activities.

IV. Technology Integration

Our comprehensive oversight of technology-assisted research capabilities ensures that advanced analytical tools support our evidence-based methodology while maintaining the highest data protection standards throughout the research and analysis lifecycle. This governance framework is complemented by rigorous due diligence and contractual requirements for technology partners, ensuring consistency with CKS data protection and confidentiality standards across all aspects of our technology-enhanced research operations.

IV. International Operations

We maintain appropriate legal mechanisms for international data transfers that ensure compliance with applicable data protection requirements across all jurisdictions where CKS operates or serves clients. Our multi-jurisdictional framework includes coordination procedures that address regulatory requirements across jurisdictions, including UAE, UK, and other applicable frameworks based on client location and specific business requirements, ensuring seamless global operations while maintaining the highest standards of data protection and regulatory compliance.

V. Client Rights & Responsibilities

We provide clients with clear information about information classification, protection measures, and processing activities affecting their data, supported by prompt notification and comprehensive response procedures for any data protection incidents that may affect client information. Clients maintain appropriate control over retention, processing limitations, and disposal of their confidential information, subject to legal and business requirements that ensure continued compliance and operational effectiveness.

In return, we ask clients to provide accurate and timely disclosure of any regulatory, classification, or sensitivity requirements affecting their information, along with cooperation in implementing appropriate protection measures and compliance with enhanced security procedures where required. Clear client authorization for required information sharing, processing, or cross-border transfers necessary for project delivery ensures that all data handling activities align with client expectations and regulatory requirements.

VI. Data Lifecycle Management

Our evidence-based approach to data retention ensures that retention periods are determined by research value, legal requirements, client needs, and business purposes, with regular review processes to ensure continued justification for data retention activities. When retention is no longer justified or required, comprehensive data destruction procedures ensure complete elimination of sensitive information from all systems and storage media, providing clients with confidence that their confidential information is appropriately managed throughout its entire lifecycle.

VII. Incident Management & Compliance

Our comprehensive incident response capabilities are designed to minimize impact on client interests and ensure appropriate regulatory compliance in the event of data protection incidents, with systematic integration of incident response experience into policy updates, procedure improvements, and preventive measures through continuous improvement processes. Regular assessment of data protection compliance, access controls, and security measure effectiveness is complemented by ongoing monitoring of policy adherence and operational performance. Independent assessment of our data protection measures and compliance with industry standards and regulatory requirements through appropriate audit and certification processes provides additional assurance of our commitment to maintaining the highest standards of data protection and professional service.

VIII. Policy Governance

Policy Authority: Craighead Kellas SAAR
Effective Date: August 8th, 2025
Contact: enquiries@craigheadkellas.com

Detailed Documentation

• Comprehensive Policies: Detailed data protection procedures, technical requirements, and operational protocols are available upon request for authorized parties with legitimate business requirements.

• Implementation Procedures: Specific classification criteria, protection measures, and compliance documentation are maintained separately and provided to relevant stakeholders as appropriate.

• Regulatory Compliance: Complete compliance documentation and regulatory mapping is available for review by clients and partners with legitimate business requirements.

This policy statement reflects our commitment to protecting client data and privacy, while enabling evidence-based research and maintaining the highest standards of professional service.

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DATE OF PUBLICATION: AUGUST 8th, 2025.

FEEDBACK ON THIS POLICY CAN BE EMAILED TO OFFICE@CRAIGHEADKELLAS.COM

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

At Craighead Kellas (CKS), our position on the use of artificial intelligence is grounded in the production of evidence and insight. We privilege methodological transparency, critical scrutiny, and a deep commitment to distinguishing evidence-based insight from unsupported assertion. We view artificial intelligence as a valuable but still experimental addition to technology-assisted research. It has the potential to be an important enabler of the evidence-based approach that defines our work. With this in mind, we energetically use and test AI tools, under controlled circumstances and within the context of our work.

We are nonetheless clear-eyed about the constraints and opportunities associated with artificial intelligence. We integrate AI technologies in our work to augment processing capability, analytical reach, and organizational efficiency. We do not defer or default to AI technologies. They reflect the data, algorithms, and design choices of their technical developers. We remain mindful of the inheritances and back-end controls that may continue to influence or route their performance. We do not substitute AI-generated logic or outputs for human reasoning, professional end-user skills and competencies, human skepticism and common sense, or context-aware interpretation.

At CKS, responsibility for determining AI value and application begins and ends with us.

I. Quality Management

CKS adheres to rigorous academic, professional, and industry standards. We strive to adhere to relevant privacy, security and other requirements, and to ISO quality management standards. We view proactive quality assurance and responsive quality controls to be essential components of our research practice. Some of our own views, listed below, reflect and supplement that position.

• Responsibilities: Responsibility for AI management and use sits with CKS and its people, and their application of qualified intellectual discipline and methodological best practice.

• Consistency: We apply the same critical scrutiny to algorithmic results as we do to information sourced through any other technology, platform, or repository.

• Provenance: Our AI-assisted work is closely monitored, meticulously logged, and carefully traced to safeguard against abuses or degradation of provenance indicators.

• Limitations: We use AI outputs in isolation for demonstration purposes only and never use them as expedient solutions to work, time, or other pressures.

• Assurances: We apply best practice quality assurance protocols, including mandatory review and comprehensive documentation of AI processes and products, regular monitoring of tools for accuracy and capability variances, and independent review and audit.

• Competencies: We engage in continuous professional development, ethics training, collaboration with AI experts, review of emerging technologies, and publication of our views and findings. These points ensure we remain at the forefront of responsible AI use.

II. Integration Philosophy

Artificial intelligence is an essential addition to technology-assisted research capabilities. We manage and use AI technologies as tools that facilitate elements of our research design and workflow. We categorically reject the anthropomorphization of AI tools. These systems are neither “colleagues” nor “research assistants”. Nor do we “collaborate” with them, any more than we would collaborate with a search engine or cite a spellcheck utility as co-author.

• Direction of Flow: Crucially, we recognize that neither human users nor AI technologies are intrinsically objective or subjective. Objectivity in research is the goal and result of properly designed, transparent, and reproducible methodologies, robust critical examination, and explicit acknowledgment of bias. Any suggestion that AI “does the objective part” while human intervention introduces subjectivity, inverts the agency that defines the process and misrepresents the strengths and weaknesses of these tools.

• Specific Applications: We have identified specific areas where AI technologies enhance our research capabilities without compromising our standards. In research enhancement, AI tools accelerate document analysis and digitization, identify patterns in complex datasets, expedite literature reviews, provide multi-language research support, and improve data synthesis and visualization. These applications allow our research to focus on higher-value analytical tasks while maintaining comprehensive coverage of relevant information.

• Research Integrity: We do not use AI for final analysis and interpretation, strategic recommendations without expert validation, client-facing deliverables without human review, or evidence evaluation and credibility assessment. These core research functions require judgment, experience, and contextual understanding that define professional research expertise. Our quality control processes explicitly prevent AI from bypassing established verification mechanisms, replacing peer review, substituting for domain expertise, or making automated decisions about research methodologies. These guardrails ensure that AI enhancement never becomes AI dependence.

III. Experimentation & Innovation

AI technologies are in their infancy and fundamentally experimental. Our approach to AI flows from this point.  We follow a dual track in which we use AI tools in our work while simultaneously investigating and testing the limits of what AI can do. This experimental methodology ensures that our AI integration remains both cutting-edge and empirically grounded. We apply the same rigorous testing and validation standards to our AI tools that we apply to our research processes and outputs, creating an iterative improvement cycle that strengthens both our capabilities and our methodological foundation.

• Thought leadership: We research AI effectiveness, develop and test novel AI-assisted research methodologies, and create proprietary frameworks and benchmarks for testing client-specific challenges. This approach positions us to understand AI capabilities and limitations, innovate technology and methods stacks, and contribute to the broader discourse on AI. The investment generates intellectual property and positions us as thought leaders.

• Prototyping Efforts: Our prototyping efforts focus on experimental AI tools for specialized research applications, development of AI-assisted provenance tracing systems, and creation of proprietary frameworks tailored to specific client challenges. We test emerging technologies through controlled experiments, comparing AI-assisted versus traditional research methods and developing and publishing metrics that evaluate AI's contribution to research quality.

• Continuous Monitoring: Our AI position evolves through structured evaluation and refinement. Quarterly assessments examine AI tool effectiveness, annual policy reviews incorporate lessons learned and technological advances, and continuous client feedback shapes our approach. We monitor industry benchmarks while pursuing innovation opportunities through pilot programs, research partnerships, and custom tool development.

IV. Risk Management & Mitigation

We actively manage the risks associated with AI deployment, including AI hallucination and misinformation, data privacy and confidentiality concerns, algorithmic bias in research outputs, the potential for over-reliance on AI tools, and cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities. Our risk management framework addresses these challenges through systematic monitoring, verification, and escalation procedures.

• Threats, Vulnerabilities, & Risks. We guard against AI-system failures, compromised research integrity, client trust erosion, compliance challenges, and competitive disadvantage. We do this through comprehensive, 360 reviews of our AI resources, ways of working, and engagements. Regular threat, vulnerability, and risk assessments ensure our AI policy and activities can be adjusted in step with new technology innovations and regulatory updates.

• Confidentiality, Data Protection, & Privacy: CKS adheres to the highest standards of client confidentiality and data stewardship. AI tools are only used in full compliance with all relevant privacy laws, codes of practice, client obligations, and contractual requirements. Sensitive or confidential material will never be processed with AI systems that transmit data to uncontrolled third-party environments. We maintain comprehensive safeguards, both technical and procedural, to ensure client data security at every project stage.

• Transparency for Clients & Stakeholders: Our research designs explicitly detail the tools we use, including AI technologies. We maintain complete transparency with clients about AI tool usage and the use of AI technologies requires informed client consent.  When we use AI to support a specific deliverable, its role and limitations are disclosed and can be explained in detail upon request. We invite questions and engagement on our methods and strive to maintain the trust that comes from open, clear communication about our work.

V. Policy Governance

Policy Authority: Craighead Kellas SAAR
Effective Date: August 10th, 2025
Contact: enquiries@craigheadkellas.com

Detailed Documentation

• Comprehensive Policies: Detailed AI procedures, technical requirements, and operational protocols are available upon request for authorized parties with legitimate business requirements.

• Implementation Procedures: Specific quality management, integration, experimentation, and risk management documentation is maintained separately and provided to relevant stakeholders as appropriate.

• Regulatory Compliance: Complete compliance documentation and regulatory mapping is available for review by clients and partners with legitimate business requirements.

This policy statement reflects our commitment to protecting intellectual property, data security and privacy, and other AI-adjacent practice considerations, while enabling evidence-based research and maintaining the highest standards of professional service.

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DATE OF PUBLICATION: August 10th, 2025.

FEEDBACK ON THIS POLICY CAN BE EMAILED TO OFFICE@CRAIGHEADKELLAS.COM

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Our policy on intellectual property reflects our fundamental commitment to evidence-based practiceby emphasizing the creation of substantive value through demonstrated expertise rather than restrictive legal barriers, while maintaining robust protection of our core competitive advantages. Our approach recognizes that intellectual property in the research consultancy domain encompasses not only traditional assets such as proprietary methodologies and analytical frameworks, but also sophisticated technology-assisted research capabilities, knowledge management systems, and the unique integration of evidence-based practice with advanced analytical tools that distinguish our market position.

The policy establishes clear boundaries between client work product, which belongs to clients upon completion of engagement terms, and underlying CKS assets including methodologies, technology platforms, and general insights that remain our property and enable enhanced value delivery across multiple engagements. Protection mechanisms span comprehensive confidentiality frameworks, contractual safeguards, and technology security measures, while our publication and disclosure standards allow for thought leadership and professional development activities that build market credibility without compromising proprietary processes or competitive advantages.

International considerations ensure that our intellectual property protection accommodates global operations through jurisdiction-appropriate legal mechanisms and compliance with technology transfer requirements, supported by clear frameworks for collaborative development and strategic partnerships that protect CKS assets while enabling business growth.

I. Policy Foundation

This policy flows from our philosophy and principles on research quality and standards. Our commitment to evidence-based practice underpins all our intellectual property management and protection protocols.

II. Intellectual Property Management

CKS maintains a comprehensive portfolio of proprietary research methodologies, analytical frameworks, and systematic approaches that distinguish our evidence-based practice and reflect our commitment to rigorous professional standards. These core assets are complemented by advanced analytical tools, research platforms, and integration systems that we have developed to support our research capabilities and enhance client service delivery. Our knowledge systems, including proprietary databases, information management frameworks, and professional development resources, further support our operational excellence and competitive positioning in the marketplace.

When conducting client engagements, research outputs and analysis produced for clients belong to the client upon completion of engagement terms and full payment. However, the underlying core methodologies, analytical processes, technology platforms, and general insights that enable this work remain CKS property and may be applied across multiple client engagements to deliver enhanced value. Client-specific adaptations and bespoke research tools developed during engagements are governed by the terms of individual engagement agreements, ensuring clear understanding of ownership and usage rights.

III. Protection Framework

Our comprehensive confidentiality frameworks protect both CKS intellectual property and client interests through appropriate legal and technical safeguards applied to all personnel, contractors, and third parties with access to sensitive information. Client engagement agreements include clear intellectual property ownership provisions, licensing terms, and confidentiality obligations that protect both CKS assets and client interests throughout the research relationship. Proprietary technology assets are further protected through access controls, monitoring procedures, and enforcement mechanisms designed to maintain their competitive value and ensure operational security across all business activities.

IV. Publication & Disclosure

CKS may publish general insights and methodological approaches for professional development and thought leadership purposes, while maintaining complete protection of proprietary processes and client confidentiality. These publication activities are carefully designed to demonstrate CKS capabilities and advance evidence-based research practices without revealing competitive advantages or sensitive operational details that could compromise our market position or client interests.

V. International Considerations

Our intellectual property protection strategies are designed to accommodate international operations through jurisdiction-appropriate legal mechanisms and compliance with applicable technology transfer requirements across all markets where we operate. International partnerships and collaborative activities are governed by clear intellectual property frameworks that protect CKS assets while enabling appropriate business development opportunities and strategic relationships that enhance our global capabilities.

VI. Policy Governance

Policy Authority: Craighead Kellas SAAR
Effective Date: August 10th, 2025
Contact: enquiries@craigheadkellas.com

Detailed Documentation

• Comprehensive Policies: Detailed intellectual property procedures, protection protocols, and enforcement mechanisms are available upon request for authorized parties with legitimate business requirements.

• Implementation Procedures: Operational procedures and technical specifications supporting this policy framework are maintained separately and provided to relevant stakeholders as appropriate.

This policy statement reflects our commitment to protecting and leveraging intellectual property assets while maintaining our philosophical commitment to evidence-based practice and professional excellence.

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DATE OF PUBLICATION: AUGUST 10th 2025.

FEEDBACK ON THIS POLICY CAN BE EMAILED TO OFFICE@CRAIGHEADKELLAS.COM

In Development

In Development

In Development