To harness the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) by accelerating the adoption of trusted, transparent and inclusive AI systems globally.
The Challenge
As the transformative potential of AI has become clearer, so, too, have the risks posed by unsafe or unethical AI systems. Recent controversies on facial recognition, automated decision-making and COVID-related tracking have shown that realizing AI’s full potential requires strong buy-in from citizens and governments, based on their trust that AI is being built and used ethically.
The path forward is now clear. Trusted, transparent and inclusive use of AI is not only the right thing to do but also is a critical success factor for institutions – business, governments or otherwise – using AI, whether they are designing it, deploying it, or embedding it into their products. Only AI systems that are trusted, transparent and inclusive will achieve long-term benefits for these institutions and society at large.
Recognizing this, actors across industry, government and civil society have rolled out an expanding array of ethical principles to guide the development and use of AI – over 175 to date. While the explosive growth in AI ethics guidelines is welcome, it has created an implementation gap – it is easier to define the ethical standards a system should meet than to design and deploy a system to meet them. It has also created learning gaps, with activities happening in silos and few mechanisms in place to drive global collaboration and rapid scaling of proven tools and practices. Furthermore, in today’s world where consensus is becoming harder to achieve, there needs to be a focus on interoperability.
The Opportunity
Many companies, governments, academics and civil society groups are engaging in promising efforts to develop tools and frameworks for making AI trusted, transparent and inclusive. In parallel, a growing number of organizations are accelerating their use of AI across key sectors, generating valuable real-world inputs to governance processes and creating live opportunities for AI developers and users to adopt innovative new approaches to building and using AI in a trusted, transparent and inclusive manner.
The World Economic Forum Global AI Action Alliance is a global community and accelerator that brings the world’s foremost AI developers and users together to:
· Accelerate the adoption of trusted, transparent and inclusive AI globally and across sectors
· Create a feedback loop of real-time learning and scaling across key sectors and challenge areas
· Catalyse and incubate new partnerships and initiatives to address urgent gaps and needs
The alliance builds on the Forum’s global multistakeholder community of leading businesses, governments and civil society organizations engaging actively with AI, and over four years of successful efforts to create interoperable governance protocols for the development and use of AI technologies. The alliance collaborates closely with the Forum’s Industry Action Groups and its Data for Common Purpose Initiative (DCPI) to ensure that AI governance reflects best practices in data governance and is interoperable globally and across industry sectors.
How Partners Can Engage
Participating organizations support the alliance through an institutional commitment to its mission as well as active participation in one or more working groups. These member-driven communities of action focus on priority governance topics, collaborating in real-time to:
1. Aggregate the most relevant tools and practices for addressing key governance challenges
2. Accelerate their adoption at scale across priority sectors and geographies
3. Drive real-time learning and rapid scaling of proven tools and approaches
4. Catalyse collective action to address key governance gaps and create global interoperability.