Synapse - Africa’s 4IR Trade & Innovation Magazine - 2nd Quarter 2021 Issue 12

Page 41

ADVERTORIAL

4 REASONS WHY

You Should Care About AI Governance NOW / By KOSA AI CEO & Co-founder Layla Li /

Have you seen AI bias make headlines recently from Amazon’s sexist AI recruiting tool to medical algorithms showing racial bias? In the new age of big data that we live in, this is increasingly relevant for companies that utilise AI’s automation power. If you’re not convinced why you should care, here are 4 reasons to act now. 1. AI Governance is becoming part of the regulatory landscape Maybe you think this is all too soon. AI is just a buzz word, your organisation is just starting a digital transformation, or you’re already market leader waiting to take the next step. Regulatory changes are happening all over the world. According to the OECD, there are already over 300 AI policy initiatives from 60 countries and territories. Most notably, a leaked draft of the AI regulation by the European Commission reveals that the lawmakers are considering fines of up to 4% of global annual turnover or €20M (whichever is greater), for a set of risky AI use-cases. Uber was recently sued by drivers in Europe over automated robo-firing. And Uber lost. The challenge references Article 22 of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — which provides protection for individuals against purely automated decisions with a legal or significant impact. If you haven’t yet started thinking about how you scale your AI operations responsibly,

2. Your customers care The risk mitigation factor pales in comparison of the benefits gained from strengthening your companies’ core values. Companies that embrace responsible AI can make boost their bottom line and differentiate the brand, because your customers care. Organisations with a strong sense of purpose are more than twice as likely to generate above-average shareholder returns, whereas AI without integrity will fail brands every time. Big players such as Salesforce, Microsoft, and Google have publicised the robust steps they have taken to implement Responsible AI. And for good reason: people weigh ethics three times more heavily than competence when assessing a company’s trustworthiness, according to Edelman research.

And more and more customers are consciously choosing to do business with companies whose demonstrated values are aligned with their own are. Companies that deliver positive impact on society boast higher margins and valuations. Organisations must make sure that their AI initiatives are aligned with what they truly value and the positive impact they seek to make through their purpose.

3. Your employees care And not just your customers, your top talent also care about ethics. In UK, 1 in 6 elite AI workers has quit their job rather than help to build potentially harmful products. Timnit Gebru, a leading AI Ethics researcher, was recently fired from Google after criticising its approach to minority hiring and the biases built into today’s artificial intelligence systems. And two engineers quit over the company’s treatment of their top talents. A well-thought-out responsible AI program not only empowers talent to innovate with human impact at front and center of their work, but also can lead to improvements in recruiting and retention, who would have thought?

algorithms, or the teams responsible for managing them. This is not just a problem for gender inequality – it also undermines the usefulness of AI”. Developing an algorithm that accurately performs on the whole spectrum of human diversity is also much more likely to deliver superior value to a broader and varied group of potential customers. Ultimately, expanding your AI program to ensure fairness and transparency will enhance revenue. AI governance is a team effort. It’s not just up to your data scientists to figure out what safeguards to put in place against undesired outcomes from your AI systems. Stakeholders across the organisations need to work together to develop a robust process that ensures accountability, transparency, fairness, safety and resilience. And always keep humans in the loop, be that your customers, your employees or the public.

4. More inclusive AIs = More revenues In the US, BCG research shows that companies lost one-third of revenue from affected customers in the year following a data misuse incident. Lack of trust carries a high financial cost. However, let’s not wait until disaster struck, the latent biases in your AI today are already costing you hidden millions. Most AIs are trained on historic data that are coded with bias and missed opportunities. According to Gartner, “By 2022, 85% of AI projects will deliver erroneous outcomes due to bias in data,

At KOSA AI, we design and build Automated Responsible AI System that help multiple stakeholders in the organisation to evaluate and solve critical issues throughout the machine learning process, so they can understand and trust the AI systems they’re building.

2ND QUARTER 2021 | SYNAPSE

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WizzPass Workspace Booking - Optimise & streamline your workspace management

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Invisio AI Scoops 3rd Place at 2020 SAB Foundation Social Innovation & Disability Empowerment Awards

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AI GONE GLOBAL: Why 20,000+ Developers from Emerging Markets Signed Up for GTC

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Nigerian insurtech startup Curacel raises $450k pre-seed round

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Clevva joins Blue Prism's Digital Exchange

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Smart Africa, Intel partner to build AI capacity building for African policymakers

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WITS, partners release AI-powered Algorithm To Detect SA’s Third COVID-19 Infection Wave

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UNESCO launches AI Needs Assessment Survey in Africa

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UMOJAHACK AFRICA 2021: Over 1 000 students participate in Africa’s largest inter-university hackathon

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ISHANGO, AIMS partnership to connect top African data scientists with international work experiences

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Liquid Telecom rebrands to Liquid Intelligent Technologies

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FROM GARAGE TO GLOBAL: How CompariSure’s conversational AI is driving digitisation within the Insurance industry

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5 Steps To Building A People Analytics Function From The Ground Up

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Willis Re Launches new South Africa Hail Catastrophe Risk Model

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PUTTING AI INTO THE ENGINE ROOM

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First Fon to French Neural Machine Translation Engine launched

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TunBERT: InstaDeep, iCompass announce partnership on 1st AI-based Tunisian Dialect System

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Grassroots NLP community Masakhane wins Wikimedia Foundation Research of the Year Award

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How IBM Wants to Accelerate DX With Latest Breakthroughs in Hybrid Cloud, AI Capabilities

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How the AU, Africa CDC will take On COVID-19 Through AI, Big Data

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DeepMind Establishes Scholarship for Wits Masters Students

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Innovation Factory (Africa) Challenge

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Machine Learning Sandcastles

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Automation 360: Automation Anywhere’s Cloud-Native Platform for Intelligent Automation

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4 Reasons Why You Should Care About AI Governance Now

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Wits Announces Team to Advance AI Research in Africa

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SANRAL explores Machine Learning Applications for Road Safety, Congestion

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Siemens, CSIR partner to boost SA 4IR skills

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Strathmore Study Lays Bare Gender Inequality in African AI Industry

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How Quantum Computing Could Propel Us Light Years Into The Future

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NVIDIA unveils its 1st Data Centre CPU

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NVIDIA Inception: Meet the African Startups Accepted Into the Programme

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How The Pandemic Gave Birth to SA’s latest 4IR SaaS platform

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Meet UCT’s 1st Google Research Scholar Program Recipients

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SA Team Places 2nd at 2021 Imagine Cup Junior Virtual AI Hackathon, Girls Edition

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These 3 African Startups Are Using AI, Data Science to Disrupt Fintech

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Why Kenya’s Ajua acquired AI/ ML fintech startup WayaWaya

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All You Need To Know About The EU’s DIGILOGIC initiative

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Lacuna Fund invests $1m in Datasets for Low Resource African Languages

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Human In The System: Understanding Customer Behaviours with ecosystem.Ai

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Hyperautomation: A Case Study

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AfDB provides $1m Grant for AI-based National Consumer Management Systems

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