A digital intelligence company has launched a global initiative to promote the development of trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
ABBYY was moved to take action by the growing prevalence of AI systems in our day-to-day lives and the anticipated growth in expectation for those systems to be fair, transparent, and ethical.
By 2025, Gartner estimates 30 percent of large enterprise and government contracts for the purchase of digital products and services that incorporate AI will require the use of explainable and ethical AI. Furthermore, three-quarters of consumers say they won’t buy from unethical companies, while 86% say they’re more loyal to ethical companies.
To get the ball rolling, ABBYY has publicized its core guiding principles on developing, maintaining, and promoting trustworthy AI technologies. The company is now advocating for other technology leaders to do likewise.
“Innovation and ethics go hand in hand. As the use of AI grows, it is important for technology leaders to adhere to and promote the use of technologies that are transparent, fair, unbiased and respect data privacy,” commented Anthony Macciola, chief innovation officer at ABBYY.
“By adhering to high standards with regards to the performance, transparency and accuracy of our products, we are able to deliver solutions that have a tremendous impact for our customers.”
Principles that ABBYY is committed to upholding include protecting confidential customer and partner data and providing visibility into the performance characteristics and metrics of its technologies, as well as providing opportunities for product feedback.
Looking beyond financial gain, the company has sworn to deliver AI technologies that are socially and economically beneficial and has affirmed that it will actively foster a culture that promotes the ethical use of AI and its social utility.
"AI has the power to yield significant social and economic benefit,” added Macciola. “With ethics in mind, we have the ability to transform the future in a manner that promotes innovation, accelerates technological advancements, and augments human intelligence, creativity and capabilities responsibly.”
Privacy is another area of concern that ABBYY has considered. The company, which uses machine learning, natural language processing, neural networks, and optical character recognition on data, has incorporated a privacy-by-design principle as an integral part of its software development processes.