Aligning your AI Strategy to your business values with the Sustainable AI Framework (SAIF)
Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to infiltrate various aspects of daily life. While some are sceptical of its potential, others believe AI can provide faster and effective approaches for addressing a wide range of problems from policing and crime prevention to personalised healthcare or streamlining the judiciary system. This is a belief which is likely motivated by the success of AI in industries such as the retail and the manufacturing industries. It is, therefore, not surprising that many organisations, including public institutions, are trying to adopt AI and related technologies in some ways or form.
Unfortunately, adopting a technology that has as much potential as AI generally requires many more inputs than the technology itself. In other words, recruiting data related professionals/experts and having them develop AI systems is unlikely to be good enough to meet all objectives.
We observed similar trends with the advent of the Internet.
As use of the Internet has increased throughout the 21st Century, users have been facing abusive practices such as unwanted commercial emails (spam), identity theft, and more recently user tracking. Experts have responded to some of these by providing technical solutions to mitigate these challenges, while regulators and government have stepped in to prohibit certain practices and in some cases now demand that organisations inform their users of their practices in advance. Importantly, we all expect organisations that we interact with online to mitigate our exposure to abusive practices. This means that from an organisation’s perspective, simply creating an online presence is probably not the biggest challenge. The real complexity lies in understanding the following questions: Are all potential challenges addressed adequately?, what is the potential return on investment in building an online presence?, and what is the impact of the online presence on the organisation’s ability to create value in short, medium and long term. In conclusion, organisations need to manage the risks around their online presence.
Investing in AI is not so different: Successfully developing AI systems that meet the constantly changing needs of today’s society requires a holistic methodical and adaptive approach designed to assess and manage the risks around AI. Such an approach should ensure that AI systems developed by an organisation are aligned with its way of conducting business and meet certain social standards. The importance of this is corroborated by the increasing importance of principles such as privacy, fairness and social equality in discussions around AI. For an organisation, failing to meet those standards can give rise to lost opportunities. Worse yet, it may even lead to an organisation’s demise, as the example of Cambridge Analytica demonstrates.
Our sustainable AI framework (SAIF) is designed to help decision makers such as policy makers, boards, C-suites, and managers and data scientists create AI systems that meet business and social principles. By focussing on four pillars related to the socio-economic and political impact of AI, SAIF creates an environment through which an organisation learns to understand its risk and exposure to any undesired consequences of AI, and the impact of AI on its ability to create value in short, medium, and long term.
Do you want your business’ AI systems to reflect your organisation’s vision and way of conducting business? SAIF is the framework you need to materialise that objective.
