Investing in AI? How can you help ensure it's safe?

“AI is going to, it already has enormous benefits, but there are significant risks. And if you want to take advantage of those enormous benefits and mitigate those risks, then you really have to deploy this responsibly. And it is not as difficult as you may think it is to do so.”

So says Judy Wade, managing director and head of strategy execution and relationship management at CPP Investments (the ​​Canada Pension Plan Investment Board), who co-authored The Responsible AI Playbook for Investors, a report published by the World Economic Forum.

With plenty of money being poured into the technology, Wade explains in this week’s Radio Davos why investors, alongside policymakers and big tech, have a role to play in ensuring its responsible deployment. What’s more, it’s in their best interests.

Here are some of the highlights of Wade’s interview on Radio Davos.

Judy Wade: [There] is a lot of focus on the large language developers. So OpenAI and Meta. But there hasn’t been a lot of focus on the actual deployment of AI in the real economy. And that’s, quite frankly, where a lot of both the benefits and the potential risks are going to occur.

And as investors, we really felt that there was an outsized role for investors to play in helping accelerate responsible AI, both of those together, and that with WEF we had a fabulous platform to learn and develop what we thought responsible AI should look like for investors.

And that means adoption of AI, again within the real economy, that’s helpful, harmless and honest. I think those are three kind of easy pillars you can hang a lot underneath. And while we think that there are these extraordinary benefits of deploying AI in the real economy, doing so without appropriate guardrails creates both significant risk but also maximises benefits.

Judy Wade: We have to be thinking about what we want this output to look like long-term and it’s very clear from much of the research that if you’re looking at long-term returns, you need to be looking at sustainable returns. You need to be looking at products that, for example, if you think where one of the biggest benefits of genAI is, is in marketing.

If your data is biased and you’re therefore excluding potentially a whole set of customers from your target customer set, that’s a long-term consequence for you. That means you’ve cut out of your total available market a whole set of customers that could be terrific.

So I think for us as investors, we’re looking for companies and [general partners] that are thinking about sustainable – I mean, I’m using that word, I think broadly – returns. And so that’s why it matters to us. And I think it was quite resonant for all of the investors that participated in this playbook that just rushing in [...] without thinking about where the values are and where the risks are, would actually also potentially affect near-term returns, not just long-term returns.

Judy Wade: [Our] role as an investor is not to make policy or regulatory recommendations but we really think that they should be run side by side. Because if you think about it, one, the regulations are still quite fluid and they are going to evolve. I think there are 27 states here in the US developing regulations. You obviously have the EU and so it’s absolutely critical that we are not ahead of but in line with those.

But there’s much more to responsible AI than checking a legal box. Back to risk mitigation, implementing responsible AI can help companies identify and mitigate potential risks. I come back to competitive advantage. Doing so responsibly with data that isn’t biased, with the right models, is actually a competitive advantage. Innovation is really critical but even outside of the regulatory environment, you want to have that innovation done with safeguards so you’re not releasing models that are flawed.

And from a brand and reputation perspective, having a set of principles, being clear about those with your consumers is actually, again, a competitive advantage.

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