AI Confidence Is Key to Resilience

Why Confidence in Your AI Systems Is Key To Achieving Resilience In Today’s Highly Volatile Market

A recent FERMA–McKinsey survey revealed that most businesses “acknowledge that the global pandemic has made risk and resilience significantly more important to their organizations.” 

McKinsey suggests, however, that companies should transition from risk management to strategic resilience to be more adaptive to disruptions — and we agree.

“The holistic approach to building resilience advances the organization from a narrow focus on risk, controls, governance, and reporting to a longer-term strategic view of the total environment,” the survey opines. “Rather than hunting for blind spots in risk coverage within today’s business model, resilient organizations embrace the holistic view, in which resilience becomes a competitive advantage in times of disruption.”

Konfer Confidence Cloud, which operationalizes AI Trust, is built on this premise. AI plays a crucial role in achieving business resilience. But society remains skeptical about using AI due to fear of potential ethical and other risk issues — and companies can address this fear more effectively using strategic resilience rather than risk management alone.

The Resilience That Stems From Confidence

AI has helped alleviate the impact of the pandemic and other business disruptions on businesses. One global company leveraged AI to monitor and determine unusual ordering patterns, which allowed them to respond accordingly. Apple and Google developed AI-powered contract tracing apps. But due to data privacy concerns, people were reluctant to use these apps.

Their fear is valid because AI systems, like any other systems, are not without flaws and vulnerabilities and may fail at any moment. And with hackers turning to AI, businesses are exposed to adversarial AI, which skews AI decisions. When AI solutions give false, unreliable, and questionable outcomes, stakeholders may become less confident in using them. It can also result in ethical issues, business disruptions, and other costly consequences.

Using a risk management approach to address these issues is no longer sufficient. Businesses must use a holistic approach to achieve AI confidence and technological resilience.

Technological resilience is not the only good outcome of AI confidence. When all stakeholders trust that their AI systems are ethical and responsible, they can confidently harness these systems to enable financial, operational, reputational, organizational, and business-model resilience.

Konfer’s Holistic Approach to Achieving AI Confidence

Konfer empowers businesses to achieve AI confidence and enable strategic resilience by using a holistic approach to operationalizing trust of their AI systems throughout their entire lifecycle, thus elevating traditional AI/ML development lifecycles into trusted AI/ML development lifecycles.

Operationalizing AI Trust is crucial in enabling AI confidence because stakeholders cannot be confident in their AI technologies if they do not trust them. And they cannot trust something that is not transparent.

Konfer Confidence Cloud provides a mechanism that empowers all stakeholders to “see” and understand the inner workings of AI systems. According to Candelon et al., “most companies still don’t build AI in such a way that they can always explain exactly how the algorithms work.” Konfer fills this gap by allowing companies to map their AI systems automatically and create a graphic visualization or a crystal clear map of their AI ecosystem. Stakeholders can use this map to determine potential ethical and risk issues which could make the businesses vulnerable.

Konfer goes beyond managing and measuring AI risks, which traditional solutions usually offer. Konfer enables a holistic approach by providing businesses with the following capabilities:

• KonferKnowledge is the repository of all AI software assets and associated attributes, including AI/ML applications, models, feature stores, and data. The Transparency delivered by the Konfer Knowledge Graph is the foundation for creating trust across AI applications.
• KonferConfidence is a quantitative measure that enables businesses to profile and measure AI/ML applications on performance, robustness, privacy, compliance, and regulatory risk factors. Scores are computed using metrics and observations aggregated over time and available in detail as a part of Application Cards, Model Cards, and Data Cards.
• KonferTrust generates operational alerts and reports. It integrates with an organization’s service management and collaboration systems like Slack to alert stakeholders of noncompliance in an automated fashion. KonferTrust automatically documents the compliance status of AI/ML applications, models, and data to internal and external guidelines, standards, and directives using Konfer Confidence Scores and Cards.

Conclusion

AI Confidence is key to achieving resilience in today’s digital and highly volatile market. Businesses can be confident that their AI systems are conscientiously doing their part in making the company adaptive to changes if they have full trust in these systems.

Businesses must transition from risk management to strategic resilience to achieve AI confidence and overall business resilience. Konfer enables you to do so by allowing your company to shift from a narrow focus on AI risk, controls, governance, and reporting to a longer-term strategic view of the total AI environment.

If you want to see first-hand how Konfer Confidence Cloud works, feel free to reach out and we can give you a free demo.