{"id":26849,"date":"2024-04-02T07:39:13","date_gmt":"2024-04-02T11:39:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/?p=26849"},"modified":"2024-04-03T17:49:09","modified_gmt":"2024-04-03T21:49:09","slug":"helping-organizations-fully-embrace-ai-technologies_change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/blog\/helping-organizations-fully-embrace-ai-technologies_change\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Create an Inclusive AI Ecosystem for Business Success"},"content":{"rendered":"

To get the best possible employees, businesses have to<\/em> become more inclusive. In this blog, we explain how an inclusive AI environment can help with DEI in your business.<\/h2>\n
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Artificial intelligence (AI) was a new buzzword, a new concept, only a few short years ago. But while there are many unanswered questions about how exactly AI is going to continue to transform our personal and business lives, there likely isn\u2019t a soul on the planet with a Wi-Fi connection, or even just a TV or radio, that hasn\u2019t heard of it or even used it. Simply put, AI is now on everyone\u2019s radar.<\/p>\n

Nearly every major organization \u2013 business or otherwise \u2013 is trying to introduce and implement AI<\/a> in a way that allows them to become more efficient and productive while also helping them improve strategic business decisions. Some organizations are mature in the space, while others are in the process of figuring it out.<\/p>\n

Levels of adoption vary widely worldwide, where most companies either haven\u2019t adopted AI and machine learning (ML)<\/a> or are still conducting research on it. One recent survey found that only 42 percent of North American companies have adopted AI or ML, 22 percent are introducing it, and 21 percent are scaling up their AI involvement.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Too often, however, C-suite executives underestimate the effect that implementing AI has on people. In AI\u2019s younger days, they largely forgot how people had to learn how to absorb AI applications into their day-to-day responsibilities and figure out how it would ultimately impact their careers.<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s still necessary for organizations to remember change management to help employees become fully comfortable with AI technology, what\u2019s no less important is for them to understand how AI adopters must overcome racial, sexual and other biases inherent in a lot of data to embrace the imperative of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the corporate world.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, overcoming bias involves being vigilant about unintended exclusionary results \u2013 say, from natural language processing algorithms<\/a>. Amazon halted its use of a hiring algorithm when it discovered the algorithm preferred applicants whose resumes included the words \u201cexecuted\u201d or \u201ccaptured\u201d \u2013 which are found more often in men\u2019s resumes.<\/p>\n

Companies can band together to tackle the problem, too. Microsoft and Robust Intelligence contributed prize money to a bias-bounty competition to reward the winning participants who devised the best tools to identify and mitigate algorithmic biases<\/a> in AI models. The contest challenged entrants to build machine learning models that label a data set of about 15,000 synthetically generated images of human faces with their skin tones, age groups, and perceived gender. They were judged on multiple grounds, including how accurately the models tagged images.<\/p>\n

Give Employees a Big Say in Planning and Implementing AI Technology<\/h2>\n

As with any significant initiative, managing the AI technology revolution<\/a> carefully and intentionally requires a well-thought-out plan, where employees participate in developing as well as implementing the plan.<\/p>\n

One such framework, called STEP, has been successfully adopted by several knowledge-intensive companies at the leading edge of AI use<\/a>. Faithful to the acronym, it involved:<\/p>\n