Designing a Responsible AI Program? Start with this Checklist

by Reid Blackman and Ingrid Vasiliu-Feltes

December 5, 2024

HBR Staff using AI

Summary.

As companies devote resources to implementing AI, many realize that they need a strategy to manage the technology’s well-documented ethical, regulatory, and legal risks. A responsible AI program (or “RAI” program for short) not only builds guardrails for particular AI solutions and the teams that manage them, but it also defines the enterprise-wide policy, governance structures, roles and responsibilities, processes, and more that enable wide-scale deployment of AI.

Reid Blackman , PhD is the author of Ethical Machines (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022). As the founder and CEO of Virtue, an AI ethical risk consultancy, he and his team work with companies to design, implement, scale, and maintain AI ethical and regulatory risk programs. His work has been profiled by The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, CNN, Fox News, and Forbes. Reid also advises the government of Canada on their federal AI regulations, has been an external senior adviser to the Deloitte AI Institute, and served on Ernst & Young’s external AI Advisory Board.

Ingrid Vasiliu-Feltes , MD, MBA has served as Chief Compliance Officer and Chief Quality and Safety Officer in highly regulated industries. She has extensive experience in operationalizing complex regulatory frameworks, as well as designing effective Quality Assurance and Quality Improvement Programs. As a Senior Advisor at Virtue, she focuses on executing complex, large scale systems integration projects and designing state of the art customized digital ethics KPIs and metrics.

Read more on AI and machine learning or related topics Risk management, Technology and analytics, Business ethics and Strategy execution

Designing a Responsible AI Program? Start with this Checklist

Summary.

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