Widely-adopted, ultra-connected, and highly-available AI systems do not come without commensurate risks. Choices made today and in the upcoming years will be essential in ensuring that increasingly powerful AI technologies lead to stable and desirable industry transformations, rather than turbulent, unmanageable economic disruptions.
Regulators, investors, and companies across all sectors are growing increasingly conscious about the potential risks of AI 1. This collective awareness is giving rise to motivations for a new approach to risk management as well as widespread demand for the technical solutions to implement such a safeguard.
A recent survey shows 91% of 13,350 respondents in Europe and the United States agree that “AI is a technology that requires careful management”.
The following section sets the stage for the burgeoning ecosystem of AI Assurance Technology providers—the recent and fast-growing industry that aims to close the gaps between AI risks and organisational risk management. We delve into the most pressing risks posed by rapid AI progress and explore the compliance requirements that regulators have started to develop in response. Besides an emerging legal and moral obligation, effective mitigation of AI risks is also demanded by sound business management practice: only truly safe and trustworthy AI will bring sustained commercial success. Whether it's cloud computing providers, data collection and brokerage vendors, frontier AI labs, downstream AI systems developers, AI-adopting enterprises, or insurance companies, each of these entities will be attending to the new AI risk management imperative.
Footnotes
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Michelle Donelon “A Pro-Innovation Approach to AI Regulation: Government Response. Ministerial Foreword”, Consultation Outcome presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology by Command of His Majesty (Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, Government of the United Kingdom, February 6, 2024), Unique Reference: E03019481 02/24, https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/ai-regulation-a-pro-innovation-approach-policy-proposals/outcome/a-pro-innovation-approach-to-ai-regulation-government-response; and Douglas Broom, “AI: These Are the Biggest Risks to Businesses and How to Manage Them,” World Economic Forum, July 27, 2023, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/07/ai-biggest-risks-how-to-manage-them/. ↩
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Noemi Dreksler et al., “Preliminary Survey Results: US and European Publics Overwhelmingly and Increasingly Agree That AI Needs to Be Managed Carefully,” Research Post (Centre for the Governance of AI, April 17, 2023), https://www.governance.ai/post/increasing-consensus-ai-requires-careful-management. ↩