Establishing Good Practices for Your AI Systems

Artificial intelligence (AI) is as inescapable as wind on the ocean, and many organizations are making concerted efforts to ensure their AI systems comply with emerging standards and regulations. AI is a useful technology, but you need to be sure you’re protecting your organization from potential risks and regulatory fines.

What Is AI Compliance, Exactly?

AI compliance is the process of ensuring your AI-powered systems adhere to any applicable laws and regulations.

In that same vein is AI governance, which includes AI model documenting and auditing pipelines to monitor how AI behaves throughout its lifecycle.

AI compliance is about checking the data you use to train your AI systems. These data training models should be:

• Legal
• Ethical
• Unbiased
• Non-discriminatory
• Accurate
• Privacy protected

Many organizations are taking AI compliance a step further by keeping their environmental, social and governance (ESG) responsibilities a key target. This means their AI usage isn’t just compliant but also employed responsibly – positively impacting society and/or the environment.

How does AI affect compliance?

AI is a growing system that utilizes technologies such as machine learning (ML) to make decisions based on past experiences. And that power can pose ethical and security threats if it isn’t dealt with compliantly.

Why is AI compliance important?

AI compliance doesn’t just protect you and your organization; the growing AI ecosystem includes technologies like machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to:

• Establish legal and ethical responsibility.
• Ensure applicable laws and regulations are met.
• Protect organizations from fines, penalties or other legal missteps.
• Protect individuals’ security and privacy.
• Protect from data breaches.

What’s the Risk of Breaking AI Compliance?

There are numerous risks to breaking AI compliance. If your AI-powered technology violates the law, your organization opens itself to risks of fines and penalties. With AI usage growing, laws over AI compliance are likely to tighten – which is why organizations should develop a compliance program to help them continuously adapt to evolving legal requirements.

As an extension of this, if there’s a data or security breach, or you’re caught using discriminatory AI technologies, you’ll not only risk financial loss but also lose brand trust and potentially suffer reputational damage, which can be very costly. Customers and stakeholders will want to avoid those organizations failing to follow AI compliance expectations.

What are the benefits of AI compliance?

By ensuring your AI-powered systems adhere to ethical, legal and regulatory standards, you’ll see benefits for your organization, your customers and for the future of AI-powered technologies. These benefits include:

• Legal and regulatory compliance: Compliance helps avoid lawsuits, fines and legal consequences related to AI misuse or unethical behavior.
• Marketplace reputation: Ethical AI practices develop public trust and a good reputation for your organization. A compliance framework addresses any biases in AI systems to prevent discrimination.
• Risk mitigation: By following compliance standards, you can reduce your risk of legal liability and establish better transparency into potential harm AI might cause – helping you plan ahead.
• Data governance: AI compliance ensures all the data used for training respects privacy rights. It’s also a good way to establish robust security measures to protect any sensitive information from data breaches.
• Market reach: Compliant AI will be more attractive to investors and stakeholders and can enable organizations to expand into new markets with stricter AI regulations.
• Competitive advantage: Compliance demonstrates an organization’s commitment to responsible AI, and ethical practices tend to lead to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Futureproof: A compliance framework encourages continuous monitoring and adaptation in the AI landscape, helping organizations innovate and stay viable in the long term.

AI compliance isn’t just a legal requirement – it’s a strategic imperative. It fosters trust, reduces risk, enhances innovation and promotes responsible and ethical AI practices, which can create a huge competitive advantage.

How Do You Ensure AI Compliance?

AI compliance is critical, especially for organizations in highly regulated sectors such as financial services, insurance and healthcare, where AI could open you up to high risks such as breaches of data privacy laws. Yes, using AI can also help financial services identify risks sooner, such as money laundering or fraudulent activity.

With stricter compliance laws developing, organizations using AI should establish a well-documented compliance program headed by a compliance officer, who will monitor and report on all AI-related activities. A compliance professional’s job is to ensure adherence to laws and regulatory requirements.

Regardless of where or how you’re using AI, a strategic compliance program should be a top priority. Here’s a list of what it should include:

1. Develop policies, procedures and best practices for using AI in your organization and standardize them across departments, teams and systems – ensuring your AI governance framework stays relevant to changing laws and external regulatory requirements. Consider implementing compliance officers within your team who can keep your AI regulations in check.
2. Continuously monitor your AI systems to ensure they adhere to laws and regulations. This includes monitoring your AI model training data for biases or discrimination. A reliable process for managing consistency and adherence is through a business process management (BPM) platform, such as SS&C | Blue Prism® Chorus BPM. BPM connects systems, processes and data to improve quality, transparency and consistency.
3. Ensure AI data privacy and security by setting up a robust system capable of handling large amounts of data safely.
4. Establish a reporting process for all AI system monitoring to ensure auditability and transparency of all activities.
5. Implement a risk management program where people throughout your business are trained in AI compliance requirements and can support best practices.
6. Deploy automated tools to help you monitor AI compliance faster and more accurately than a human could accomplish manually.

What Technologies Can Help With AI Compliance?

AI compliance can quickly become a complex task. Automation technology can help organizations achieve compliance by automatically monitoring AI systems to ensure guideline adherence. Below are some of the technologies that can be useful:

• Robotic process automation (RPA) can automate routine compliance-related tasks in real-time. This reduces human error and ensures accuracy, consistency and auditability across compliance processes.
• Intelligent automation (IA) automates end-to-end processes for more streamlined and consistent workflows. IA is where RPA and AI work together with other technologies, including business process management (BPM), process intelligence, intelligent document processing (IDP), machine learning (ML) and so on.
• Cloud services can use compliance features such as access controls, encryption and compliance certifications for various industries to ensure your monitoring is up to date on the latest regulations.
• Generative AI (gen AI) has many use cases. It can create synthetic data for testing and validating AI models without exposing sensitive or private information. It can also moderate content to identify and filter out non-compliant content generated by AI systems. Content generation is the future, and there are many ways organizations can prepare for generative AI.

AI is helping organizations think bigger about intelligent automation (IA), which has revolutionized how businesses operate, unlocking greater levels of productivity and accuracy. Examples include:

• SS&C | Blue Prism® Document Automation and SS&C | Blue Prism® Decipher IDP, intelligent document processing (IDP) solutions that help organizations extract data from documents faster and more accurately than humans.
• SS&C | Blue Prism® Decision, which automates use cases involving human-like decision processes and enables organizations to query and analyze large amounts of data.
• SS&C | Blue Prism® Process Intelligence, which provides recommendations from that data.
• SS&C Everywhere, which provides organizations with data-driven insights to make informed decisions. With analytics engines and AI services, organizations can derive new analytics and train ML models on a robust cloud computing platform.

It's clear that any organizations using AI in their systems will need at least some level of compliance and governance if they’re going to futureproof their operations. More AI compliance laws and regulations are emerging, and it’s best to plan ahead rather than fall behind.

Looking for more information on how you can use automation to support your AI compliance program? Speak to an SS&C Blue Prism expert today.