Explainable AI: Why should business leaders care?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly pervasive and is experiencing widespread adoption in all industries. Faced with increasing competitive pressures and observing the AI success stories of their peers, more and more organizations are adopting AI in various facets of their business. Machine Learning (ML) models, the key component driving the AI systems, are becoming increasingly powerful, displaying superhuman capabilities on most tasks. However, this increased performance has been accompanied by an increase in model complexity, turning the AI systems into a black box whose decisions can be hard to understand by humans. Employing black box models can have severe ramifications, as the decisions made by the systems not only influence the business outcomes but can also impact many lives.