AI Shouldn’t be Left Unattended

The flow of articles and announcements about new AI tools or services coming to market is constant, as more and more industries lean into this technology to streamline services and offboard tasks from their human capital. While AI has many strengths, it’s essential to maintain some human oversight to ensure that your AI tools are operating as expected and haven’t deviated in any way from your organization’s expectations.

AI as an emerging technology is fascinating, powerful, and more than a little daunting to fully wrap our heads around as it integrates more and more into our daily lives.  While there are many things that AI excels at, it is probably unwise to turn AI loose without some kind of supervision.  Like a toddler learning to walk, it’s important to have some guardrails up and “adult” supervision to make sure that things don’t take a turn for the worse. 

Case in point, there was a recent article regarding a customer support AI that went a bit rogue when users began reaching out for support after being mysteriously logged out when switching devices. The AI shared with customers that this behavior was “expected” based on a new login policy. The issue, however, was that there was no new login policy responsible for the issue; the AI made up, or “hallucinated,” that response on its own. Some organizations that leaned too heavily into their AI deployments are now scaling back after poor outcomes and customer pushback on social media.

Regardless of how tempting it might be to offload tasks to AI, ongoing human oversight is essential to:

• Avoid bias: AI can perpetuate or amplify biases present in its training data which could result in unfair outcomes in areas like hiring or customer service- leading to reputational damage or legal consequences.
• Ensure accountability and compliance: Oversight helps ensure AI decisions are in line with industry standards and legal requirements. Provides documentation on how decisions are made
• Correct model drift / performance degradation: Over time, AI performance may decline as real-world conditions shift. Oversight can keep systems effective and relevant
• Error detection and correction: Human supervision can catch anomalies, correct errors and fine-tune outputs which may be critically important in high-stakes domains like finance, healthcare, and legal services
• Utilize ethical and strategic judgement: AI lacks human values and contextual awareness. Human oversight helps ensure that AI aligns with the organization’s broader ethical principals, brand, and long term strategic goals.

The benefits of AI are enormous, as a collaborative resource, but like so many online resources, it’s also important to validate the results for accuracy and relevance before automatically assuming they are accurate.