Accenture wants to beat unfair AI with a professional toolkit

Next week professional services firm Accenture will be launching a new tool to help its customers identify and fix unfair bias in AI algorithms. The idea is to catch discrimination before it gets baked into models and can cause human damage at scale. The "AI fairness tool", as it's being described, is one piece of a wider package the consultancy firm has recently started offering its customers around transparency and ethics for machine learning deployments -- while still pushing businesses to adopt and deploy AI. (So the intent, at least, can be summed up as: 'Move fast and don't break things'. "Most of last year was spent… understanding this realm of ethics and AI and really educating ourselves, and I feel that 2018 has really become the year of doing -- the year of moving beyond virtue signaling. And moving into actual creation and development," says Rumman Chowdhury, Accenture's responsible AI lead -- who joined the company when the role was created, in January 2017.