Narrator: Artificial intelligence
and the algorithms that power it
can be a tremendous benefit to businesses and to society.
AI can enhance productivity,
sharpen analytical capabilities,
and vastly improve the consumer experience.
But it can also cause harm, damaging the planet,
and marginalizing smaller businesses
and underrepresented communities.
Implementing responsible AI is the process
of understanding how AI can lead to negative outcomes,
and then putting guardrails in place to mitigate harm
while still delivering the business impact we're after.
Let's consider a fictitious company, Olive Market,
that wants to take full advantage
of the power of AI and do so in a responsible way.
Olive Market wants what every retail company wants:
to deliver a consistent shopping experience
by maintaining a well-stocked store
amid increasing market volatility.
Responsible AI starts with an understanding
that long-term success depends
on building customer trust and loyalty.
For Olive Market, that means a corporate commitment
to respect the environment, source products with integrity,
and act in ways that support the health
and well-being of its surrounding communities.
As it begins to build its AI infrastructure,
Olive Market would reinforce its commitment
to responsible AI by using external reviewers and tools
to test and assess algorithms
and implement bias-mitigation measures
when using any kind of training data.
One example of the need for bias mitigation
is the use of computer vision.
Computer vision algorithms must be trained
by feeding them labeled images
of customers walking into stores.
But if those images aren't representative of the population,
including people with different skin tones,
Olive Market's computer vision system may undercount people
of different racial and cultural backgrounds.
Thus, these customers' unique dietary needs
and preferences might not be reflected
in Olive Market's purchasing decisions.
To mitigate this bias, store owners
could require their AI solution vendor to test
for various skin tones and achieve comparable performance
before using the computer vision system in their stores.
That way, Olive Market has confidence
the system will work for their customers.
Hallucinations can occur in personalized texts
that are sent out to customers with non-existent items
and incorrect store locations.
Olive Market can adopt a responsible AI approach
by layering on information retrieval
and checking to reduce hallucination occurrences
in the texts sent out to customers.
Negative outcomes can also be a result
of the restocking process.
On its own, the scheduling algorithms
might select produce sources based on the lowest price.
If so, it might source produce
from a large corporate farm far from the store location,
meaning higher transportation costs
and a higher carbon footprint.
To prevent this, the scheduling algorithm
could be trained on data specifically curated
for each store region so it could factor
in sustainable solutions available locally.
Sourcing in a responsible way might even lead
to investments in local farms and local communities.
In fact, the company's IT staff could input local sourcing
as an explicit goal of Olive Market's scheduling algorithms.
And it could make sure that its AI implementation
includes explainability tools that open
the black box because the better its executives
and managers understood how these advanced learning models
make recommendations, the more they would be able
to adjust the algorithms to meet both
Olive Market's commercial goals and its social commitments.
To be successful in the long term,
Olive Market would make sure that
its AI system had human beings in the loop.
We call this our Human plus AI Strategy.
Only humans can give AI recommendations
the kind of sniff test, or reality check,
that prevents companies from blindly
following machine-based recommendations.
Here at BCG, we are devoted to helping companies
like Olive Market build AI the right way.
That's why we have a team of responsible AI experts
that's committed to all our work with machine learning.
We're here to help you transform
your organization and build your bottom line,
and do it in a way that supports you,
your customers, and the community's
shared values-now and in the future.