Embracing AI responsibly is critical. We are at a crossroads. Never have ethical considerations and trade-offs been more critical in innovation. Every organization needs to stand accountable for how their use of data and AI is affecting people and society. New requirements in ESG and CSR reporting would be a natural step forward.  

ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. CSR stands for Corporate Social Responsibility. This is often called sustainability. In a business context, sustainability is about the company’s business model, i.e. how its products and services contribute to sustainable development, and how it affects people and society. Sustainability is also about a company’s risk management, i.e. how it manages its own operations to minimize negative impact.

AI will be one of the leading components in innovation, competitiveness, and productivity. But, as there are exponential values to the technology, so are the ethical and societal risks - a technological negative spill-over. Unintended consequences of AI, like discrimination, privacy intrusion, lost autonomy, social exclusion, and deep fakes, must be avoided. These consequences will violate Human Rights as well as have severe negative financial and reputational impacts. Organizations must stand accountable for how their use of data and AI affects people and society. Business models need to take account of the “tech-spill” to ensure sustainable profits and financial growth. Sustainable AI is hence a natural component in CSR and ESG reporting. The screening and risk assessment of these unintended ethical and societal risks will be an important step to embrace AI in a responsible and ethical way – to create innovations humans can trust. Also, in the wake of the organization’s actions to get ready for the upcoming EU regulation on AI, this is a moment to see the positive effects on competitiveness from the proposed EU regulation on AI.

As founder of anch.AI, former AI Sustainability Center, and Associate Professor in AI and jointly with  Dr. Ricardo Vinuesa Motilva from the KTH Climate Action Centre, we suggest that screening and assessing for unintended ethical and societal risk in AI applications should be introduced as a new requirement for CSR and ESG reporting. We are thrilled to deep-dive on organizations’ responsibilities for sustainable and trustworthy AI on the 16th of March. This will be done in the frame of a workshop on AI for sustainability organised at Expo Dubai, as part of the event “European AI Excellence and Trust around the world”. We will be two of the panelists participating together with other experts – Dr. Aimee van Wynsberghe, Professor in Applied Ethics of AI at the University of Bonn, Ms. Emanuela Girardi, Founder of Pop AI. Please read our paper on AI as an enabler or a disabler of achieving the UNSDGs here.

Register here to follow our workshop on #AISustainability online

About anch.AI

Based on our multidisciplinary research, we have created a unique methodology for screening, assessing, auditing, and mitigating ethical risk in AI applications. Based on Nordic values. While the anch.AI platform is rooted in our multidisciplinary research we have undisputed excellence in applying research into state-of-the-art tools that demystifies AI and help organizations govern AI aligned with their organizational values.

That makes us leaders of innovation humans can trust, with an ambition to release the real power of ethical AI. As a one-stop-shop for Ethical AI, we do not only wish to apply screening, assessment, mitigation, and reporting tools but to be at the cutting edge of ethical and sustainable AI insights. Therefore, we make it crucial to operate as a data-driven insight platform, and constantly leverage the data from our tools together with our team’s diverse knowledge to generate unique insights and ways to walk the talk.

About KTH Climate Action Centre

Dr. Vinuesa’s group at KTH has been very active in the development of AI methods for complex engineering problems, with important implications for the SDGs. With several publications of high impact in Nature, we have highlighted the need for robust and transparent AI solutions, where interpretability is key. Furthermore, Dr. Vinuesa is part of the new KTH Climate Action Centre, where we take multi-disciplinary solutions to tackle the outstanding problem of climate change.

Read our research on:

Felländer, A., Rebane, J., Larsson, S., Wiggberg, M., & Heintz, F. (2021). Achieving a Data-driven Risk Assessment Methodology for Ethical AI.  at:  https://anch.ai/publications/achieving-a-data-driven-risk-assessment-me…

Goh, H., & Vinuesa, R. (2021). Regulating artificial-intelligence applications to achieve the sustainable development goals. Discover Sustainability, 2(1), 1-6.  https://anch.ai/publications/regulating-artificial%e2%80%90intelligence…