Since 2023, MIT Sloan Management Review has published debates around the responsible use of AI (RAI). The debates were based on specific questions or statements raised to a panel of experts, who were asked to express and explain their dis/agreement with the question or statement (from strongly disagree to strongly agree). Our CEO and co-founder, Dr. Richard Benjamins, has participated in all those debates. This series of blog posts gathers his responses to the 14 debates held on RAI.

All blog posts in the series have the same structure. The title is the question, followed by the rate of dis/agreement, and the brief text is the position of Richard. Responses were limited to 1200 characters, so the posts are short.

This is the third post in the series.

The management of RAI should be centralized in a specific function (versus decentralized across multiple functions and business units)

STRONGLY AGREE

Whereas ensuring the responsible use of AI requires the concerted involvement of many different functions and business units, the management of RAI should be centralized in a specific function, such as an “AI Office”. The responsibility of the central function is to set the change (RAI) in motion; make the organization aware; support business units in appointing RAI champions and that they are properly trained; make sure that the organizational AI governance model is understood and followed by the business units; liaise with other relevant areas such as ESG, privacy, security, IT, legal, AI, etc.; set up communities of practice; support the AI ethics committee; etc. The “AI Office” should be a small, committed, and multidisciplinary team. At the beginning it doesn’t matter too much where it sits in the organization as long as it is well-recognized. The centralized function is especially important when starting with RAI. Once the process is internalized by the organization (like data protection is now in many organizations), the role becomes less critical for operations and can more focus on new trends and developments to continuously improve the RAI processes and make them more efficient.

The full debate is available here.