AI Bias a Real Concern in Business, Survey Says

The potential benefits of AI for businesses are huge. But those benefits could be eroded by hidden biases that damage brand reputation and customer trust, according to a survey of US and UK businesses commissioned by DataRobot. According to DataRobot's "The State of AI Bias in 2019," which was released last week, 42% of organizations surveyed reported being "very to extremely" concerned about AI bias occurring in their organizations. This number jibes with another finding from the DataRobot survey: that 38% of the organizations surveyed reported they use "black box" machine learning systems that offer no insight into how it makes decisions. The juxtaposition of AI bias concerns and black box systems is enough to warrant serious questions about the direction compaines should take with their machine learning, according to John Giannandrea, Apple's senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy.