Many of my colleagues have put out blog posts or articles on this topic. How might one make the case for investing in AI governance?
I think the fact that these articles have to be written and rewritten ad infinitum suggests that the case is actually harder than we as AI governance professionals might think or might like. As an analog, no one ever has to make the case for investing in sales or marketing, for example.
Why is there such a disconnect? Here are a couple of ideas.
Many executives and founders, understandably, don’t want the medicine if they don’t feel the pain
An AI governance professional who is trying to make the case for investing in AI governance is quite likely to have already lost this battle. In my experience, executives and founders are not particularly likely to take our word for it as consultants and vendors that this investment is worthwhile if they haven’t felt the need firsthand.
Of course, not all of us are consultants; organizations that have hired AI governance staff internally have already made the decision to invest in AI governance. The flip side of that is that those that have decided not to hire AI governance staff or upskill current staff in legal, policy, or GRC have made the opposite choice.
There is real regulatory uncertainty, and not in the way we might like
For years I thought the regulatory uncertainty was going to be a killer app for AI governance. Organizations that didn’t know what law or regulation was coming down the pipe and from what jurisdiction would surely want to invest in a robust system of governance, right?
It’s actually played out the other way.
I saw this play out very specifically with New York City Local Law 144. Everyone in our governance community was telling potential clients that they need an audit ASAP. Something less than 1% of organizations actually did the audit, and there was virtually no enforcement action. We’re seeing that play out again with the EU AI Act. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the EU AI Act will not be enforced. It likely will be but we’ve seen it pushed back and watered down. There’s no real way to predict how that’s going to continue to play out over the next few years.
How do you actually make the case for AI governance?
I think there are certainly some organizations who are ahead of the compliance angle, and there are certainly some who are willing to invest in AI ethics and transparency. From my experience the case that actually works for AI governance is simply a question of go-to-market and sales enablement.
More and more organizations are going to push AI governance requirements further up the value chain. That means that if I’m an HR executive at a large organization, I may be aware of AI governance issues. Instead of investing in that in my own organization, I want to cram that responsibility down to my vendors as efficiently as possible.
If you’re on the developer side, my guess is that the case is going to be quite clear. In fact, in my experience it’s the developers who have reached out most proactively in our consulting practice for audit and assurance work.
If we’re looking to make this business case, what we’re looking for are industries where there is a growing norm that AI governance issues should appear on third-party vendor questionnaires. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. This means it’s going to be a heck of a lot easier to make the case for highly regulated industries like healthcare, insurance, finance, education, and the like.
