How ethical AI practices and data privacy shape the future of responsible innovation

By Hervé Chapron 25 Sep 24 Reading time: 5 mins

Data privacy and ethical AI practices have become essential pillars for any forward-thinking organisation today. As AI continues to shape products and services, the need for responsible development has never been more critical. According to a recent report from Harvard Business Review, over 80% of AI projects fail, largely due to issues with data quality. This statistic highlights the urgent necessity for robust AI ethics frameworks, ensuring that the technology evolves in a way that upholds fairness and respects user rights.

A comprehensive AI code of ethics must address key areas like preventing bias, safeguarding privacy, and mitigating environmental impacts. Ethical standards shouldn’t just be an afterthought but integrated into the entire lifecycle of AI, starting at data collection and continuing through every stage of development. By embedding these practices across all organisational levels, companies can ensure that their use of AI remains transparent, equitable, and sustainable.

The core principles of ethical AI include:

• Fairness: AI technology should aim to remove biases stemming from skewed data or past injustices. This involves meticulous evaluation and tweaking of algorithms to avoid unfair treatment. 
• Transparency: AI operations and outcomes need to be understandable and accessible to all stakeholders, building trust and enabling well-informed choices. 
• Accountability: Mechanisms must be in place to ensure AI creators and users can be held accountable for the operation of their systems. These measures address blame and liability in case of unexpected consequences. 
• Privacy: It’s vital to safeguard personal information from unauthorised access and ensure ethical AI practices. This requires strong data security measures and honouring user consent.

Two primary ways to implement AI ethics are through organisational codes of ethics and government-led regulatory frameworks. Both approaches play crucial roles in addressing global and national ethical AI issues and in setting the policy groundwork for ethical AI in companies.

Robust data governance vital for AI ethics

Ethical AI goes beyond creating sophisticated algorithms; it demands a conscious integration of the core principles throughout the entire AI lifecycle. Data governance sets the stage for managing, safeguarding, and using data responsibly.

Effective data governance supports ethical AI by ensuring that the data used in AI systems is accurate, secure, and handled responsibly. Good data governance protects the organisation and its customers while strengthening the reliability and credibility of the AI solutions it provides.

As AI technology advances, it brings both benefits and risks, especially regarding privacy, fairness, and accountability. Effective data governance encompasses managing access to data, ensuring proper data usage, and protecting individual rights. It ensures that organisations maintain transparency about how AI models are developed, trained, and deployed.

Equally important is data quality, which serves as the foundation on which AI systems are built. Data quality relies on robust master data management (MDM) in a business, the two concepts co-exist this way are mutually exclusive. Once MDM is in place and your data quality corresponds, you can then look at actively using AI to automate some data quality processes.

No one wants AI to make critical decisions based on flawed or inconsistent data. By incorporating AI into data quality monitoring, organisations can automate the detection of anomalies, errors, and inconsistencies within their data assets. Embrace the symbiotic relationship by prioritising strong data management practices that allow AI systems to deliver the best return on investment.

AI models in practice

It works as follows: AI models are trained to recognise the patterns and rules that define acceptable data quality for a particular organisation. Once implemented, these models continuously monitor data flows, signposting any violations or anomalies for further review. They can also identify sensitive personal data and ensure it’s handled in accordance with regulations such as GDPR, or check business data against relevant compliance guidance, for example, the new CSRD for environmental regulations. 

Businesses can confidently prevent compliance violations from slipping through the cracks by maintaining a vigilant AI-driven oversight of data practices and model behaviours. It’s like having an extra set of eyes watching over data 24/7.

For AI models, techniques like AI explainability enable a deeper understanding of the “black box,” helping to pinpoint potential sources of bias, discrimination, or other ethical risks. This proactive approach decreases the manual effort required from data stewards by identifying issues early before they escalate. 

Instead of conducting tedious manual checks, the AI handles the bulk of the work, enabling human experts to concentrate on remediation. The outcome is a more reliable data pipeline, ensuring trustworthy, high-quality data to generate dependable AI insights.

A symbiotic relationship

Understanding an organisation’s data landscape is essential for effective data governance and AI enablement. However, manually cataloguing and classifying all data assets is an overwhelming task. This is where AI and a robust data management platform can assist through automated data classification.

AI models can be trained to comprehend a company’s data taxonomy, metadata conventions, and business glossaries. Once deployed, these models can automatically analyse new data sources, classify them based on type, content, and relationships, and apply the appropriate metadata tags. This significantly reduces the manual classification workload for data stewards.

AI-driven data classification offers a more comprehensive and up-to-date view of a data estate. This improved data governance provides a robust foundation, enabling organisations to build and deploy AI use cases with confidence.

As organisations continue to leverage AI for competitive advantage, investing in solid data governance and data management practices will be essential for maximising the benefits of AI while mitigating associated risks. By adhering to robust governance and ethical standards, organisations can ensure that the data used in AI systems is of high quality, fostering trust and integrity in AI applications.

Hervé Chapron /

Hervé Chapron is SVP & General Manager EMEA at Semarchy.