Organizations Are Gearing Up for More Ethical and Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence, Finds Study

A new study shows that business leaders are taking steps to ensure responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI) within their organizations. Most AI adopters – which now account for 72 percent of organizations globally – conduct ethics training for their technologists (70 percent) and have ethics committees in place to review the use of AI (63 percent).

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Do you conduct ethics training for your technologists? SAS, Accenture, Intel 2018

AI leaders – organizations rating their deployment of AI “successful” or “highly successful” – also take the lead on responsible AI efforts: Almost all (92 percent) train their technologists in ethics compared to 48 percent of other AI adopters.

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.

“Organizations 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, organizations need to move beyond directional AI ethics codes that are in the spirit of the Hippocratic Oath to ‘do no harm’. They need to provide prescriptive, specific and technical guidelines to develop AI systems that are secure, transparent, explainable, and accountable – to avoid unintended consequences and compliance challenges that can be harmful to individuals, businesses, and society. Data scientists are hungry for these guidelines.”

AI leaders also recognize the strong connection between analytics and their AI success. Of those, 79 percent report that analytics plays a major or central role in their organization’s AI efforts compared to only 14 percent of those who have not yet benefited from their use of AI.

“Those who have deployed AI recognize that success in AI is success in analytics,” said Oliver Schabenberger, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer at SAS. “For them, analytics has achieved a central role in AI.”