Can the ethics of AI keep up with the pace of innovation?

At Digital Futures, our engineers tackle ethics in AI every day in real-world scenarios in their roles with our clients.

Data analyst Alistair Boyer works directly with AI ethics at a global financial institution. “I work in a team developing Generative AI to boost efficiency across the bank’s internal processes,” Alistair explains. “However, in the highly regulated financial industry, ethics is an important consideration for us and unrestricted AI is considered too much of a risk to provide directly to our colleagues.”

Alistair’s team is developing a control framework and monitoring tools to manage that risk. He explains, “In my role, I engage with risk stakeholders from around the globe to help them understand our product in the context of rapidly evolving AI regulation.”

Alistair’s colleague, data analyst Rowan Jarvis, also works with Generative AI. His focus is on driving AI adoption and training. “I’m part of a team that’s spearheading the development and implementation of Generative AI capabilities to streamline internal operations, rather than customer-facing applications,” Rowan explains.

For both Alistair and Rowan, the training they received in the Digital Futures Academy is directly contributing to the work they are doing.

Firstly, their skills in Python, web scraping and data visualisation gives their teams the capability to measure the performance of the GenAI and carefully manage the risk associated with it. Secondly, their ethics training is making an important contribution to their teams where ethics in AI is a high priority. Their work is clearly showing how financial institutions can innovatively leverage AI, even in a highly regulated environment. The direct result is a boost to the bank’s ranking in the Evident AI Index – a framework that evaluates financial institutions’ AI governance, risk management, and ethical implementation practices.