A new study shows that business leaders are taking steps to ensure responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI) within their organisations. Most AI adopters – which now account for 72 per cent of organisations globally – conduct ethics training for their technologists (70 per cent) and have ethics committees in place to review the use of AI (63 per cent). This is typically more prevalent in the UK, with 80 per cent of British companies saying that they conduct ethics training.
AI leaders – organisations rating their deployment of AI “successful” or “highly successful” – also take the lead on responsible AI efforts: Almost all (92 per cent) train their technologists in ethics compared to 48 per cent of other AI adopters – in the UK this rises to 71 per cent.
The findings are based on a global survey among 305 business leaders, more than half of them chief information officers, chief technology offers, and chief analytics officers. The study, “AI Momentum, Maturity and Models for Success,” was commissioned by SAS, Accenture Applied Intelligence and Intel, and conducted by Forbes Insights in July 2018.
AI now has a real impact on peoples’ lives which highlights the importance of having a strong ethical framework surrounding its use, according to the report.
“Organisations have begun addressing concerns and aberrations that AI has been known to cause, such as biased and unfair treatment of people,” said Rumman Chowdhury, Responsible AI Lead at Accenture Applied Intelligence. “These are positive steps; however, organisations need to move beyond directional AI ethics codes that are in the spirit of the Hippocratic Oath to ‘do no harm’.
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