Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming business, societies and to this extend regulatory environments, creating unforeseen demands on corporate legal functions while offering new ways to build a competitive advantage through a tech-ethical positioning. Together with Lex Mundi and Morrison & Foerster LLP, this checklist was developed as a starting point for General Counsels to establish an AI governance system that goes beyond compliance.
Position your company at the forefront of the Cognitive Era
>>> assess your AI readiness here. <<<
The Company AI Readiness (CAIR) Index© develops a comparative view of a company’s readiness to responsibly deploy and scale AI, providing operational guidance on how it can improve its position. The data this index generates will help inform policymakers as they design needs-based ethical frameworks. As such, it will improve both business and societal welfare in a Cognitive Era driven by a human-centred, machine-augmented economy.
The issue CAIR addresses
Few companies and policymakers are ready for the emerging Cognitive Era. Research suggests that 91 percent of companies in more than 126 countries expect to deliver AI-powered business growth by 2023, only 18 percent of firms understood and adopted these technologies in 2018. 1 As examples like the FacebookCambridge Analytica scandal show, even the smaller set of companies that have integrated AI at a large scale tend to approach it from a purely technological perspective without much regard for ethics and human-centricity. However, in a world of thinking machines, AI challenges the status quo of human-machine interaction, and it begins to redefine our notions of values, trust, and power.
To sustain healthy economies and societies, it is imperative that businesses, civil society, and policymakers collectively consider the far-reaching implications of AI and build a global ethical framework that allows us to capitalize on AI’s opportunities and mitigate its risks.
Our approach
The Company AI Readiness (CAIR) Self-Assessment Tool allows participating companies to evaluate how well they are prepared to leverage AI as a key asset and differentiator for corporate, innovation and product strategies; how to recognize potential harmful missteps; and how to prioritize areas for action and investment. Similar to some Fortune indices, the Index will provide a benchmark against which users can assess companies’ systemic and structural readiness for the effective and responsible AI use. It will allow comparisons within and across industries:
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Ethics & Governance: Ethics architecting, Policy, Procedures & Accountability
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People & Expertise: Human-Centricity, Human Development, Collaboration & Skills
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Data & Infrastructure: Access, Quality, Suitability, Suitability, Power
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Economic Performance: Commercial Products & Services
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Leadership & Strategy: People-Appropriateness, Relevance, Foresight, Communication, Feedback
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R&D Capabilities: Quality, Funding, Collaboration
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Operations Capabilities: Diffusion, Human and Cyber Security, Institutional Partnerships
Each company participating in this index will receive an individual AI Readiness Scorecard. It will entail a confidential and detailed assessment of their strengths and weaknesses, providing operational guidance to enhance their readiness to develop, apply and scale AI responsibly. The system then allows the participating companies to compare themselves with the AI capacity of other companies and thus identify their own strengths or weaknesses. The comparative database already contains the anonymized data of 70+ companies from 20+ countries.