Keys to a Successful AI Adoption Strategy

To drive growth and success, businesses worldwide are incorporating AI tools into their processes and systems to automate routine tasks, optimize operations, and improve decision-making.  Are you ready to roll out AI in your business?  We’re breaking down the keys to seamless AI implementation and adoption.

Although AI technologies provide many benefits, they can also introduce legal, reputational, and ethical risks. Developing and implementing corporate AI policies can help an organization use AI responsibly, increase employee trust, and mitigate the risks inherent in AI tools.

What Is a Corporate AI Policy and Why My Business Should Have One

A corporate AI policy is a set of rules and guidelines that help an organization develop, deploy, and use AI tools safely and responsibly. An effective AI policy highlights potential risks and establishes a framework to address legal and ethical issues that arise from AI use. It also ensures that AI systems align with business objectives.

Large corporations and SMBs are rapidly adopting AI technologies for a wide range of uses, from providing customer support and screening job applicants to optimizing operations and advancing data analytics. AI tools offer many benefits, but they also come with sometimes overlooked risks, including data privacy and security vulnerabilities, biased or discriminatory outcomes, and intellectual property hazards.

To avoid significant financial, legal, or reputational harm to your business, key reasons to adopt an effective AI policy include:

  • Safeguarding data privacy: ChatGPT and other AI tools may expose sensitive business or personal information, such as protected health information (PHI) and personally identifiable information (PII) in a healthcare context.
  • Avoiding bias or discrimination: Data sources used in AI may have racial, gender, age, or other biases that may result in unintended discriminatory outputs that could adversely affect individuals, such as job and loan applicants.
  • Ensuring legal and regulatory compliance: To avoid legal issues or penalties, your business must adhere to data privacy, consumer protection, intellectual property, and other laws. For example, AI-generated content may reproduce copyrighted materials, and using this content could expose your business to an infringement lawsuit.
  • Encouraging ethical and responsible AI use: Establishing clear principles and rules for employees will empower them to develop and deploy AI tools in ways that respect human and corporate values and benefit society.

Other Benefits of Corporate AI Policies

To protect against potential AI risks, organizations should set up guidelines that define acceptable and unacceptable uses of AI technologies. In addition to mitigating financial and reputational risks and ensuring ethical and responsible use of AI tools, AI policies can drive productivity, innovation, and growth by helping employees confidently experiment and control AI technologies.

Building a culture of AI innovation also helps an organization attract and retain top talent. AI knowledge and experience have emerged as desirable employee skills, and top talent will be attracted to companies that have demonstrated responsible and effective AI use. A refined AI policy shows current and prospective employees that an organization is thoughtful and proactive in its approach to AI technologies.

What Should a Corporate AI Policy Include?

The first step in creating an effective corporate AI policy is to assess your organization’s needs and goals. This process will help you identify where AI can improve operations or solve problems, reveal AI risks, and determine which AI tools are the best fits for your business. Repetitive tasks and large datasets that could benefit from machine learning are common processes and systems that can benefit from the adoption of AI tools. You can set up an AI working group to oversee policy creation, identify expertise, and ensure representation from various departments and stakeholders.

Once you’ve completed these two initial steps, you can start drafting your corporate AI policy. It should specify rules for how your organization should use and manage AI technologies. Corporate AI policies typically include these elements:

  • A designation of who is responsible for the implementation and enforcement of AI policies
  • Rules to ensure compliance with laws and regulations, including data privacy, consumer protection, and intellectual property laws
  • Strict protocols for data collection, storage, and usage
  • Data security measures, such as encryption and data anonymization, to protect sensitive business information and personal data
  • Detailed processes to prevent discrimination and bias, such as rules for using diverse and representative training data and for scheduling regular bias reviews.
  • Clear ethical guidelines and ethical impact assessments to avoid unintended harmful consequences and negative social impacts
  • Detailed processes directing how AI-driven decisions should be validated
  • Detailed processes establishing accountability when AI tools have been used

To ensure that your AI policy is effective, you’ll need to educate and train employees on the policies and how they can comply with them. You’ll also need to monitor AI performance to ensure AI tools function as intended, such as generating desirable results. Finally, review and update your corporate AI policy regularly. Business goals, market conditions, and technologies change rapidly, so your AI guidelines must evolve to keep pace with transformations.

A corporate AI policy can help organizations of all sizes ensure the safe, ethical, and responsible use of AI technologies. Developing, implementing, and updating AI policies and protocols can be a challenge, but there are ways to incorporate AI into your environment safely.

5 Ways to Incorporate AI into Your Work Environment Safely

Many businesses have embraced artificial intelligence (AI) because it can help employees with everything from handling mundane tasks to performing complex operations and generating new ideas. Let’s take a look at five popular AI use cases that your business may want to consider and the safety measures that can help ensure the safe use of AI tools.

1. Adopt AI Chatbots

AI chatbots can provide information or customer service through text-based interfaces on websites, messaging apps, and other touch points. These chatbots use machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to understand queries and provide accurate, human-like responses.

AI chatbots learn from each interaction with human and perfect their performance over time. AI chatbot software also provides a “backdoor” for hackers to access a business’s data or network. Unencrypted chatbot communications, insufficient employee cybersecurity training, and exploitable entry points on third-party hosting platforms are among the common vulnerabilities that an organization should address when adopting an AI chatbot.

 2. Employ AI Virtual Assistants

Consumers have been using Alexa, Siri, and other AI virtual assistant tools for years, and many businesses are adopting them as time savers. A virtual assistant is an app that understands natural language voice commands and completes tasks for the user.

In a business setting, a virtual assistant can:

  • take dictation
  • read email messages and other texts aloud
  • provide meeting reminders
  • perform other useful tasks

Because AI virtual assistants listen, gather, and store information about users, they pose significant privacy concerns. When using them in a business environment, be sure to set controls to limit data sharing and avoid giving a virtual assistant access to sensitive business information.

3. Use AI to Create Content

AI can help, whether your task is to:

  • edit or format existing text or to create new technical documentation,
  • product descriptions
  • client communications
  • marketing content

Rather than having employees draft copy from scratch, they can input information into an AI writing tool. AI writing software uses machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to generate text.  AI writing tools aren’t perfect, so a human will still need to review the AI drafts to check language usage and ensure factual correctness, but these tools can significantly boost efficiency. Also, employers should establish security protocols to ensure employees don’t unintentionally expose sensitive business information when using these tools.

4. Leverage AI As a Test Platform

AI has become particularly useful in business environments by enabling businesses to generate both simple and complex simulations quickly and efficiently. Employees can easily change variables and parameters when running multiple simulations in a very wide range of scenarios to test ideas or assess various outcomes in applications from staff management and spreadsheet formulas to complex lab environments.

When using AI for testing, it’s essential to protect proprietary business information by removing unnecessary data from datasets before using them in AI algorithms. This best practice helps prevent the unintended sharing or misuse of sensitive business data.

 5. Expand Data Analytics and Business Intelligence with AI

AI’s biggest impact on business to date may be in the field of analytics. The use of machine learning techniques to identify and interpret data patterns is helping businesses in many industries find new data patterns, gain insights, and make predictions – all of which lead to better data-driven business decisions. AI has exponentially boosted the speed, range, and granularity of data analytics.

Data security concerns are increasing as business data expands in volume and grows in complexity, increasing the cybersecurity threat surface. To use AI-augmented data analytics safely, organizations should assess their AI usage and service providers to ensure security best practices are in place to protect sensitive business data.

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to deliver significant benefits to businesses and society – but it also has the potential to cause significant harm if we fail to understand the risks that the technology poses. Data breaches, public exposure of sensitive business information, critical errors, and reputational harm are among the many risks. Let’s take a look at five risks your business may want to consider before implementing AI tools.

Risks of Incorporating AI in Your Work Environment

Lack of Employee Trust

The lack of confidence and trust between employees and employers, known as the AI Trust Gap, is not surprising given the relative immaturity of GenAI and the exponential pace at which technology is evolving. The World Economic Forum (WEF) reported this year that only 55% of employees are confident their organization will ensure AI is implemented in a responsible and trustworthy way and 42% believe their company doesn’t have a clear understanding of which systems should be fully automated and which require human intervention.

Hackers

The rise of AI is contributing to increased hacking in the workplace, as malicious actors can now leverage AI capabilities to launch more sophisticated, personalized, and automated cyberattacks, making it easier to target vulnerabilities and breach systems. This includes creating highly convincing phishing emails, identifying patterns in data to exploit weaknesses, and automating attack sequences, posing a serious threat to businesses.

Unintentional Biases

AI systems learn to make decisions based on training data, so it is essential to assess datasets for the presence of bias. AI bias, also called machine learning bias or algorithm bias, refers to the occurrence of biased results due to human biases that skew the original training data or AI algorithm—leading to distorted outputs and potentially harmful outcomes.

Errors

Recognizing the limitations and risks surrounding AI tools is important. AI can make errors for a number of reasons including: the input of incorrect information, unintentional biased decisions as mentioned above, incorrect data interpretation, poor data quality, inadequate testing and validation and much more. AI has suffered numerous failures and because of the widespread use of AI, those failures can affect millions of individuals and businesses.

Legality

So you want your company to begin using artificial intelligence. Before rushing to adopt AI, it’s important to consider the potential legal issues. Some common AI legal issues include: intellectual property disputes, data privacy concerns, liability and accountability when an AI system makes a decision that leads to harm, transparency and explainability specifically within healthcare and criminal justice sectors, and bias and discrimination which can be perpetuated by AI systems.

It’s always important to put safety first when adopting Artificial Intelligence for Business

Businesses should maintain a safety-first approach when adopting new AI technologies. No matter which type of AI tool you want to incorporate into your workflows, it’s helpful to keep two universal AI best practices in mind.

First, any AI tool is only as good as the dataset it works with. Because internet-facing tools are notoriously inaccurate, it’s vital to use AI within the framework of a secure, trusted, and filtered dataset. Second, it’s essential not to abandon human intelligence and judgment. A qualified employee should be entrusted to make any final decision before a definitive business action is taken based on the work of an AI tool.

Ensuring network and data security when adopting AI tools can be a challenge. For a free network security assessment to help you better protect your business from the risks posed by using AI technologies, contact us today.