Analyst insights

4 AI Governance Actions to Make a Swift Business Impact

AI governance is a topic organizations need to take into serious consideration as they implement new AI projects. Read this report to learn Gartner® Key Findings:

Enterprise leaders are taking steps to advance AI governance beyond just principles
AI governance is new to the enterprise, it’s often separated from existing governance practices
AI is inherently hard to govern because enterprises must meet the demands for safety and value under conditions that involve complexity
A continually evolving regulatory landscape related to AI, although not well-understood, requires immediate attention and actions

Summary

According to Gartner® “Enterprises need AI-specific governance to reduce risks and tolerate the complexity intrinsic to AI. Although there are many essential activities on the path to AI governance success, data and analytics leaders should take four practical actions to make immediate business impact.”

Preview

Definition: AI governance is the process of assigning and assuring organizational accountability, decision rights, risks, policies and investment decisions for applying AI.

Simply put, the essence of AI governance is asking the right questions and giving the answers to these questions to put the right guardrails in place. In most cases, no single person can ask all the right questions — the job of AI governance is to put together a diverse group of people who can compile a comprehensive set of questions. For example:

Should fairness be defined and measured differently depending on the use case?
Does the AI design allow corrective measures to reinstate good model behavior?
Should we support facial recognition?

There are no right or wrong answers to these questions, as long as you give them a good consideration. Part of AI governance is decision rights — answering the hard questions and resolving dilemmas by considering risks, policies and investment decisions for applying AI.

_{Gartner, 4 AI Governance Actions to Make a Swift Business Impact, Svetlana Sicular, Jim Hare, 17 August 2022.}