Cloud giant Amazon Web Services made the ethical use of AI a theme at this week’s re:Invent conference, partnering with the likes of IBM and Tate Consulting Services on initiatives and launching a partner program for data and AI governance.
In the runup to AWS’ annual show, IBM announced plans to enhance the integration of its watsonx.governance – a suite of tools to ensure models meet high standards for compliance, accuracy, and transparency – with AWS’ Amazon Sagemaker, a cloud service for building and training machine learning models.
At the event, AWS partnered with Tate in creating an ethical AI platform that “provides mutual customers with access to advanced techniques like fairness metrics to mitigate bias and ensure ethical outcomes,” Nidhi Srivastava, vice president and global head of Tates’ AI.Cloud offerings, wrote in a blog post.
Meanwhile, AWS’ Data and AI Governance and Security partner initiative is aimed at giving partners a simplified framework – including enablement tools, access to AWS innovations, and go-to-market benefits – that will allow them to provide tailored solutions that include strong governance, security and compliance.
“By bringing together expert consulting and technology partners, we’re empowering organizations to build strong foundations for responsible, secure, and innovative data and AI practices,” Rick Sears, director of data processing and executive sponsor of the partner initiative, wrote in a blog post. “This initiative will be crucial in helping our customers navigate the complexities of the modern data landscape, ensuring they can harness the full potential of their data assets with confidence.”
A Need for Ethical AI
As enterprise adoption has accelerated, there’s been a broad push among vendors, lawmakers, and others to ensure that the emerging technology is developed and used in a way that is beneficial to society. Microsoft developed what it calls the Responsible AI Standard, a framework for building AI systems that uses the principles of fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency and accountability.
In writing about AWS’ efforts, Vasi Philomin, vice president of generative AI at the cloud provider, said this summer that “we strive to make our customers’ lives better while also establishing and implementing the necessary safeguards to help protect them.”
Forrester Research is predicting global spending on AI governance software will quadruple between now and 2030, reaching $15.8 billion and accounting for 7% of overall AI software spending. Driving the growth is “the urgency for organizations to manage AI’s integrity amid rapid AI adoption and increasing regulatory demands,” Forrester analysts wrote.
Tighter IBM Integration With SageMaker
IBM officials said that this month, the company is delivering a more streamlined user experience by integrating the watsonx.governance console with SageMaker, which will enable organizations to assess the risks in their AI models and create a workflow for model approval. In addition, companies will be able to directly share information about models from the SageMaker Model Registry, enabling them to create a unified workflow for governing AI operations.
In addition, IBM’s Guardium AI Security data protection tool in AI pipelines is now available on the AWS Marketplace.
Responsible AI Platform With Tate
The ethical AI platform AWS and Tate are offering is important for organizations to both address evolving AI regulations and create value and enable scalability of AI applications for business and society, Tate’s Srivastava wrote. She noted that in Tate’s AI for Business Study, 95% of about 1,300 senior executives surveyed said ethical frameworks that guide the responsible use of AI are needed.
“However, while many acknowledge the importance of Responsible AI, the reality is that implementations lag behind due to obvious challenges in a non-standard technology and evolving regulatory landscape,” Srivastava wrote, noting that as organizations take their first steps with AI, the focus has been more on proving the value from technology and value perspectives. “For the most part, the initial focus has not been on embracing guardrails – but as the businesses move from PoCs [proof of concepts] to scaled production, they are recognizing the imperative of Responsible AI.”
The framework the consulting firm built with AWS is aimed at contextualizing responsible AI principles into guidelines and policies that can evolve over time. The framework is based on Tate’s Responsible AI SAFTI tenets for building responsible AI based on the principles of security, accountability, fairness, transparency and identity protection. Tate also offers its Responsible AI SAFTI through such cloud providers as AWS and Microsoft Azure.
