AI is receiving a push from the race to find a vaccine, diagnostics and effective treatments for the COVID-19 virus, and the push has also heightened awareness of the need to implement AI that is transparent and free of bias--AI that can be trusted. The World Economic Forum is one organization that has responded. With ethics in mind, the organization's AI and Machine Learning team recently announced its Procurement in a Box toolkit with concrete advice for purchasing, risk assessments, proposal drafting and evaluation. To produce the toolkit, the Forum worked over the past year with many organizations, including the United Kingdom's Office for AI in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, with Deloitte, Salesforce and Splunk, as well as 15 other countries and more than 150 members of government, academia, civil society and the private sector. The development process incorporated workshops and interviews with government procurement officials and private sector procurement professionals, according to a recent account in Modern Diplomacy.

"Artificial intelligence is often considered magic," says Professor Tom Davenport, addressing a crowd at Babson's Boston campus during the recent Centennial Celebration. "Companies think it can transform their businesses overnight." Davenport, the President's Distinguished Professor of Information Technology, is an AI expert, thanks to his research and work with large enterprises. Instead, Davenport says what really works is lots of low-hanging fruit. "Jeff Bezos calls it quietly but meaningfully improving core operations," says Davenport, who describes it more succinctly as "boring AI." There's little doubt that artificial intelligence is here to stay.