Ensuring AI Policy Compliance with the Fairly AI Governance Platform

Ensuring AI Policy Compliance with the Fairly AI Governance Platform

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Introduction

In this case study, we explore how Client X, a leading technology-enabled company in a regulated industry, successfully implemented the Fairly AI Governance platform to ensure compliance with AI policies. By leveraging Fairly platform's capabilities, Client X was able to mitigate potential risks, maintain ethical standards, and comply with internal policy and regulatory requirements.

Background

Client X is an established financial services company that relies on AI technologies. With the increasing complexity and potential risks associated with AI, the company’s internal audit and compliance teams recognized the importance of implementing robust governance practices to ensure responsible and ethical AI development and deployment.

Challenges

Client X faced several challenges in implementing AI policy compliance, including:

1. Lack of transparency: The company’s internal audit and compliance teams needed a solution to provide visibility into AI models and algorithms that their company's in-house data scientists built to ensure fairness, accountability, and transparency from an audit and compliance perspective.
2. Compliance: Client X operated in a heavily regulated industry, requiring adherence to data protection, privacy, security standards, existing and upcoming AI regulations.
3. Ethical considerations: Client X aimed to develop and deploy AI systems that align with ethical standards and minimize biases, discrimination, and unintended consequences according to the company’s ESG goals and industry best practices.

Solution

Client X’s internal audit and compliance teams partnered with the Fairly AI Governance platform to address the challenges mentioned above. The Fairly platform provided the following key features:

1. Model documentation: The platform allowed Client X to document the AI models' development process, including data sources, preprocessing techniques, algorithms used, and performance metrics. This documentation enabled transparency and facilitated auditing processes.
2. Algorithmic fairness: The Fairly platform incorporated algorithms to detect and mitigate bias in AI models. It provided tools to assess fairness across different demographic groups, ensuring that the AI systems did not discriminate or marginalize any particular group.
3. Privacy and security controls: Client X leveraged the platform's data protection and security features to comply with standards and regulations such as NIST Cybersecurity Framework. The platform enabled granular access controls, encryption, and de-identification techniques to safeguard sensitive user data.
4. Auditing and monitoring: The platform offered comprehensive auditing capabilities, allowing Client X’s internal auditors to use exhaust data to analyze AI model behavior, data inputs, and outputs. It enabled ongoing monitoring of model performance and flagged any deviations or potential compliance risk.
5. Explainability and interpretability: The Fairly platform provided tools to explain and interpret AI model decisions. This allowed Client X to understand the factors influencing AI predictions, ensuring transparency and mitigating biases. It also provided executive reports and compliance reports to explain the risk status of the AI models in easy to understand “traffic light” signals.

Implementation and Results

Client X deployed the Fairly AI Governance platform on their Microsoft Azure private cloud in 8 days. The implementation process involved training their teams on platform usage, and defining governance policies. Additional integrations with their existing AI infrastructure is planned in the future.

The implementation of the AI governance platform resulted in the following outcomes:

1. Enhanced transparency: Client X gained a holistic view of their AI systems, enabling better understanding and control over the model's behavior.
2. Improved compliance: The platform's privacy and security controls helped Client X ensure compliance, building trust with their customers.
3. Reduced bias and discrimination: By leveraging the platform's fairness assessment tools, Client X was able to identify and mitigate biases in their AI models, making their solutions more inclusive and equitable.
4. Mitigated risks: The auditing and monitoring capabilities of the platform allowed Client X to proactively identify and address potential risks, ensuring the reliability and safety of their AI systems.
5. Increased stakeholder trust: Client X's commitment to responsible AI development, as demonstrated through the use of the Fairly AI Governance platform, fostered trust among customers, regulators, and other stakeholders.

Conclusion

Client X successfully implemented the Fairly AI Governance platform to ensure compliance with AI policies. By leveraging the platform's transparency, fairness, and auditing capabilities, Client X not only mitigated potential risks but also aligned their AI systems with ethical standards. The implementation resulted in enhanced trust for all stakeholders.

About Fairly AI

The concept of Fairly AI Inc. (henceforth “FAIRLY”) was started in 2015 as an interdisciplinary research project involving ethics, cognitive science, and computer science. After extensive product concept and design iterations, FAIRLY was formally incorporated in April 2020, and is a global operation headquarters in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. In addition, FAIRLY has received support from the Vector Institute, NEXT Canada and the ventureLab in Canada.

FAIRLY provides an AI governance platform focussed on accelerating the broad use of fair and responsible AI by helping organisations bring safe and compliant AI models to market. The system provides end-to-end AI governance, risk and compliance solutions for automating risk management for AI, applying policies and controls throughout the entire AI system lifecycle.

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