As companies increasingly adopt AI (artificial intelligence), a buzzing topic right now is that of AI ethics and what impact it ultimately has on people’s lives. In essence, ethics can be described as the difference between what is right to do and the right to do. Combined with AI technology that is fast pace and evolving by the minute, it has resulted in companies facing a greater deal of responsibility as well as potential that it ultimately entails.
An important part of AI intelligence is its core capability of learning, in which it can observe data or decisions made by humans and learn to make similar as well as smarter choices. However, this has showed to have both positive and crucial negative effects. Positive in it being able to make smart and efficient decisions for you, and negative in it adopting biased standards. If a recruiter tends to reject candidates with other ethnicities, the AI will unconsciously start filtering out similar future applicants as well. Furthermore, AI powered recruiting tools have increasingly turned out to be biased and yet many companies continue to rely on AI without adopting ethical values.
Developing Transparency
More commonly, tech companies contain and develop ethics boards and have their own AI principles. However, despite continuous efforts of being transparent, it rarely is. While important institutions and companies have developed effective boards that represent their core values, it’s unclear in who’s interests really are represented. Google for example only created its’ AI ethics standards after employees left in protest after being delegated to help the Pentagon design video analytical tools for drones. Moreover, AI is slacklining ethics in helping us be far more productive while also being an essential tool to develop more accurate weapons.
With this in mind, how can we really ensure AI trust and transparency with our consumers? It has increasingly become a competitive advantage not only to adopt AI, but to adopt ethical standards and accountability for what they do. A whooping 86% of today’s consumers solely base their decisions on trust and loyal companies that have a positive impact on society. Companies therefore need to continually make ethical values and accountability a focus of development to differentiate themselves from competitors and remain in the spotlight.
While maybe not ever being completely able to prevent mistakes from happening with AI, a few important steps towards ensuring trustworthy AI systems conclude the need to handle data with great integrity and protection with only legitimized users given access. Secondly, The AI systems should be transparent and traceable in its efforts to inform consumers of its capabilities and limitations. Thirdly, AI systems need to be accessible to all without unfair bias against marginalized groups. Lastly, the systems need to strive for the benefit of societal impact and the wellbeing of human rights. Developers of these systems need to continually ask themselves what risks and benefits their systems entail.
Adopting Ethical AI Standards at Dstny
As Dstny deals with sensitive information on a day to day basis, we inherently acknowledge our significant role we play in our consumers lives and work. This can include data such as names, addresses, phone numbers or payment information. While consumers need to be aware and cautious of when and how companies use and store personal data, we inherently understand and strongly believe our responsibility is the crucial key-role.
Our AI systems created using this sensitive data are ultimately used to deliver a successful and useful product for internal and external communication. However, we consistently work to ensure and inform you that personal data is handled with great integrity and used solely in best interest of the consumer in delivering an exceptional product and fulfill consumer demands. Furthermore, this may for example include; informing consumers of when conversing through our AI systems, ensuring it doesn’t bias against race, ethnicity or gender, taking full responsibility for the AI systems we create, and respecting the rights of privacy.
We strive to have an ongoing conversation and culture that not only involves developers. Reinforcing ethical AI standards are part of our core values that drive all decisions made; trust, customer success, innovation and equality. We believe these principles set the foundation for our company and future development of AI and in delivering a useful product.
While we might not have as complex AI systems as Google, our Ai system uses the information you provide to create live lists and analytics of incoming and outgoing calls. Dstny Analytics uses the information to create a Callboard with top lists of ongoing calls and provide information on agents’ engagement rate. In addition, our Wallboard shows agents and their availability combined with number of calls in queue, average queue time and number of missed calls. In addition, we have a Virtual Q Bot where you can let a bot take your place in queue and spend your time elsewhere with just a click of a button.
To learn more about our AI systems and how we work to protect privacy and personal information, we recommend reading about Dstny Analytics and privacy policy below;