Ethics in AI increasingly important for consumers

Author Moonshot.news

Published on: 05/05/2022

Artificial Intelligence can often be seen as scary and even negative. 85% of consumers say that it is important for organizations to have an ethical approach as they use AI to tackle society’s problems. 75% of executives last year said AI ethics is important, up from less than 50% of respondents in 2018, a survey made by IBM Institute for Business Value shows.

The report comprises 1 200 executives across 16 businesses in 22 countries.

”Many organizations have taken steps to embed AI ethics into existing business guidelines. But consumers, citizens, and employees indicate more needs to be done”, the report says.

Key findings:

• Business leaders are taking accountability for AI ethics in today’s enterprise. Non-technical executives are now the primary champions for AI ethics, growing from 15% in 2018 to 80% 3 years later—and 79% of CEOs are now prepared to act, up from 20%.
• Many organizations have made solid strides toward purposeful AI. More than half of organizations have taken steps to embed AI ethics into their existing approach to business ethics—and many of those are creating AI-specific ethics mechanisms.
• But the intention-action gap is still too wide. For example, having a diverse and inclusive workforce is important to mitigating bias in AI—acknowledged
  by 68% of organizations—but AI teams are still substantially less diverse than their organizations’ workforces: 5.4 times less inclusive of women,
  4 times less inclusive of LGBTQ+ individuals, and 1.7 times less racially inclusive

”Only 40% of those surveyed trust companies to be responsible and ethical in their use of new technologies such as AI—a similar percentage to 2018.”

Also, corporate leaders say significant work remains. Fewer than 20% of executives strongly agree that their organizations’ practices and actions on AI ethics match (or exceed) their stated principles and values.

Accountability has shifted dramatically since 2018, the survey shows. At that time, executives pointed to their technical leaders as primarily responsible for AI ethics. The 2021 survey shows that companies across all industries and geographies are now looking to their non-technical executives to lead—and with a collaborative approach.

“They are learning that the complexity of operationalizing AI ethics requires input from all business functions.”