AI advisory board, assemble

The International Association of Privacy Professionals teamed up with leaders from Google, Microsoft, and IBM for an AI advisory board.

The International Association of Privacy Professionals teamed up with leaders from Google, Microsoft, and IBM for an AI advisory board.

Tech Policy

Big Tech execs to advise on ‘upskilling’ for AI governance

The International Association of Privacy Professionals teamed up with leaders from Google, Microsoft, and IBM for an AI advisory board.
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The debate over how to regulate AI development is alive and well, everywhere from Washington and boardrooms to the front page of the New York Times.

But when it comes to who will ultimately handle the internal oversight once policies are in place, the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) said it sees a wide-open lane. The not-for-profit professional organization then called on experts from the tech world, academia, and the public sector to help fill it.

Privacy executives from Microsoft, IBM, and Google are stepping up to advise the IAPP’s newly formed AI Governance Center. The goal? To upskill privacy professionals from the private, public, and nonprofit sectors into AI governance leaders.

An AI bill of rights, risk frameworks, and research centers are all essential, IAPP President J. Trevor Hughes said, “but none of it means anything if there aren’t people inside organizations who will do the work to ensure that AI is implemented safely in a compliant and trustworthy way.”

Hughes said a survey of IAPP members indicated that privacy professionals are likely to be tasked with AI oversight at their own organizations: “We found that in over half of cases, the file labeled ‘AI risk management’ or ‘AI governance’ was already landing on…the privacy leader’s desk,” he said, later adding that “[companies] were leveraging the existing structures in place within the privacy department in order to better manage AI risk.”

The survey found that among the respondents currently designing their own AI governance structures, 50% were doing so on top of existing privacy programs.

Training wheels: While privacy professionals have “massively transferable skills” for the AI governance world, there’s also a knowledge gap, Hughes said. That’s where the IAPP AI Governance Center and its roster of privacy experts can add value, he said.

“AI raises new issues that have not traditionally been within the domain of privacy pros,” Hughes said. “Things like algorithmic bias, fairness, and discriminatory testing and discriminatory outcomes…privacy pros do need to upskill into that world,” he said, pointing to additional issues like content moderation and intellectual property.

IAPP’s AI advisory board includes Keith Enright, Google’s chief privacy officer; Christina Montgomery, IBM’s chief privacy and trust officer; Anna Zeiter, eBay’s chief privacy officer; academics from Oxford, Brown, and Ohio State; and a privacy policy advisor from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, among others.

Those board members will weigh in on training and certifications IAPP develops as part of its mission to upskill the privacy sector, and also “put [IAPP] in touch with the people that we need to be talking to as we develop solutions in this space,” Hughes said.

“We’re going to stay in our lane, but we’re also going to…professionalize this new area of AI governance as quickly and as well as we possibly can.”

Keep up with the innovative tech transforming business

Tech Brew keeps business leaders up-to-date on the latest innovations, automation advances, policy shifts, and more, so they can make informed decisions about tech.

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