Urgency for Responsible AI: A Call to Action for Enterprises

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has brought about significant benefits to enterprises, but it has also raised critical concerns regarding the accuracy, fairness, and security of AI systems. In response, organizations are increasingly exploring the principles of responsible AI, which emphasize the importance of fairness, transparency, and societal benefit. A recent report by HCLTech and MIT Technology Review Insights underscores the urgency for enterprises to implement responsible AI principles to unlock trust and customer adoption of enterprise AI.

According to the report, the essential building blocks of AI trustworthiness include validity and reliability, safety, security and resiliency, accountability and transparency, explainability and interpretability, privacy, and fairness with mitigation of harmful bias. To investigate the current landscape of responsible AI across the enterprise, MIT Technology Review Insights surveyed 250 business leaders about how they are implementing principles that ensure AI trustworthiness. The poll found that responsible AI is important to executives, with 87% of respondents rating it a high or medium priority for their organization.

However, despite the importance placed on responsible AI, only 15% of those surveyed felt highly prepared to adopt effective responsible AI practices. This disconnect highlights the need for enterprises to take immediate action in implementing responsible AI principles. To put responsible AI into practice in the age of generative AI, leading companies are adopting best practices such as cataloging AI models and data, implementing governance controls, conducting rigorous assessments, testing, and audits for risk, security, and regulatory compliance, empowering employees with training at scale, and ultimately making responsible AI a leadership priority.

Steven Hall, chief AI officer and president of EMEA at ISG, a global technology research and IT advisory firm, emphasizes the urgency of this situation: "Everybody understands how transformative AI is going to be and wants strong governance, but the operating model and the funding allocated to responsible AI are well below where they need to be given its criticality to the organization."

Enterprises must recognize the importance of responsible AI and take immediate action to implement these principles. By doing so, they can unlock trust and customer adoption of enterprise AI, ultimately reaping the full benefits of AI technologies while mitigating risks and building trust with stakeholders.