Responsible AI: The Path to Increased Business Value

Every day, we’re hearing about new developments in generative AI — and businesses are paying attention. The explosive growth of artificial intelligence models and tools is dominating the conversation around innovation and showing up on 2024 product roadmaps everywhere.

A recent McKinsey survey reveals that expectations around the impact of gen AI are high across industries, with three-quarters of industry leaders expecting to see “significant or disruptive” change in their field due to gen AI and around 40% saying that their organization intends to increase their overall investment in AI due to recent advances. Additional McKinsey research estimates that AI adoption could add the equivalent of $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion of value to the global economy annually.

But to tap into this promising potential, organizations have to integrate AI in a transparent, secure, and trustworthy manner, operationalizing AI governance — or what Gartner defines as AI TRiSM (AI Trust, Risk, and Security Management) — into their data and AI landscape. The advantages of doing so are enticing: Gartner estimates that, by the year 2026, organizations that operationalize AI transparency, trust, and security will achieve a 50% increase in AI adoption and business goal attainment. That’s a big incentive to get AI governance right.

Managing AI Risk: Uncontrolled AI Is Bad for Business

Alternatively, the risks involved in unregulated AI can be disastrous. From financial institutions to leading brands to government agencies, there’s no shortage of cautionary tales around recent AI harms. The AI Incident Database has around 2,000 examples of such debacles that have cost organizations around the globe dearly.

Without the right controls and oversight in place, enterprises encounter risks related to blind spots, shadow AI, data opacity, unsecured models, uncontrolled interactions, compliance violations, and other vulnerabilities that create a host of unwanted consequences and threats to a company’s financial and reputational status. And since many questions and uncertainties still surround the use of generative AI tools and technologies, many privacy and security teams are navigating uncharted waters when it comes to planning ahead.

Start by Knowing Your AI Landscape for Achieving Responsible AI

But if uncontrolled AI is a recipe for disaster, trustworthy AI is the path to accelerated business value. Responsible AI begins with taking control of your AI landscape — including:

1. Discovering and cataloging your AI models across all your public clouds, private clouds, and SaaS applications.
2. Evaluating and classifying AI models against regulatory standards and risks such as toxicity, bias, efficiency, copyright, and disinformation.
3. Enabling continuous Data + AI mapping to connect your AI models to data sources, processes, vendors, and potential risks.
4. Implementing in-line data and AI controls to ensure compliance with governance, security, and privacy standards.
5. Automating management and reporting of compliance with over twenty regulatory standards, such as NIST AI RMF and EU AI Act.

Enterprises that successfully carry out these five steps and implement sound AI governance practices will spearhead responsible innovation that translates to business value, effectively:

1. Gaining full transparency into their AI systems, developing a deeper understanding of them, and better control over how they operate.
2. Unlocking clear visibility into their AI risk awareness so they can identify and mitigate potential risks effectively.
3. Achieving clarity over AI data processing, ensuring that data handling is efficient, ethical, and compliant with regulations.
4. Safeguarding their technology against misuse and vulnerabilities by constructing adequate protection around AI models and interaction systems.
5. Discovering how best to navigate the constantly evolving landscape of AI regulatory compliance and stay ahead of legal and ethical requirements.

Generating Business Value from Responsible AI

Effective AI governance involves ethical design, responsible implementation, continuous monitoring, and constant adaptation to evolving business and societal needs. Forward-thinking businesses that lead the charge in responsible AI will unlock a number of business benefits that include financial gain, informed decision-making, and enhanced reputation as trustworthy innovators.

Financial Gain

Businesses that implement the safe, reliable, and trustworthy use of AI will be at the forefront of innovation, unlocking efficiency, hyper scalability, and unprecedented productivity. They will discover new ways to engage with customers and employees, generate relevant content and experiences, and enhance customer service — and will be able to allocate resources more effectively, enter new markets, better serve existing markets, and grow their top line.

More Informed Decision-Making

With responsible use of AI, enterprises can extract new insights from data, discover new patterns and opportunities, generate new hypotheses and recommendations, and forecast more reliable outcomes using predictive analytics — all on the basis of trustworthy AI models. By having AI models and practices they can trust, these enterprises will increase their ability to derive valuable insights from data for positive business outcomes.

Enhanced Reputation

Enterprises that can trust their data tend to have customers that can trust the enterprise — and the enhanced brand reputation that comes with responsible data practices pays off. The transparent, secure, and trustworthy use of AI mitigates risk before it leads to malicious attacks or data breaches, as well as helps companies keep pace with the growing list of global AI regulations, leading to increased reliability and customer loyalty.

By managing AI risk and getting ahead of the unwanted consequences that can come from uncontrolled or unregulated AI models, companies can get on the path toward accelerated business value and unlock unprecedented benefits. Read the whitepaper to discover more about Securiti’s five steps to responsible AI — and how you can ensure the safe, trustworthy, and compliant use of AI across your business.

Explore AI Governance Center https://securiti.ai/ai-governance/