Microsoft outlines its 'AI Customer Commitments' to keep artificial intelligence in check

What you need to know

• Microsoft just shared three "AI Customer Commitments" that were created to help customers use artificial intelligence responsibly.
• AI is rapidly advancing both in terms of popularity and its capabilities, but people have raised concern about if the technology will be used ethically.
• Microsoft committed to share what it learns, help customers deploy AI platforms while meeting requirements, and develop AI programs for its partner ecosystem.

Microsoft is one of several tech giants to invest heavily into artificial intelligence. While AI is impressive, powerful, and versatile, there are several concerns about how it will be used. Laws and regulations still need to catch up to the capabilities of artificial intelligence, but they likely will not roll out at the same pace AI advances.

In order to help keep AI in check, Microsoft shared three "AI Customer Commitments" that aim to help customers implement AI responsibly.

Antony Cook, Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, shared the following commitments in a blog post:

"Share what we are learning about developing and deploying AI responsibly"

• Sharing expertise: We are committed to sharing this knowledge and expertise with you by publishing the key documents we developed during this process so that you can learn from our experiences. These include our Responsible AI Standard, AI Impact Assessment Template, AI Impact Assessment Guide, Transparency Notes, and detailed primers on the implementation of our responsible AI by design approach.
• Providing training curriculum: We will also share the work we are doing to build a practice and culture of responsible AI at Microsoft, including key parts of the curriculum that we use to train Microsoft employees.
• Creating dedicated resources: We will invest in dedicated resources and expertise in regions around the world to respond to your questions about deploying and using AI responsibly.

"Creating an AI Assurance Program"

• Regulator engagement support: We have extensive experience helping customers in the public sector and highly regulated industries manage the spectrum of regulatory issues that arise when dealing with the use of information technology. For example, in the global financial services industry, we worked closely for a number of years with both customers and regulators to ensure that this industry could pursue digital transformation on the cloud while complying with its regulatory obligations. One learning from this experience has been the industry’s requirement that financial institutions verify customer identities, establish risk profiles and monitor transactions to help detect suspicious activity, the “know your customer” requirements. We believe that this approach can apply to AI in what we are calling “KY3C,” an approach that creates certain obligations to know one’s cloud, one’s customers and one’s content. We want to work with you to apply KY3C as part of our AI Assurance Program.
• Risk framework implementation: We will attest to how we are implementing the AI Risk Management Framework recently published by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and will share our experience engaging with NIST’s important ongoing work in this area.
• Customer councils: We will bring customers together in customer councils to hear their views on how we can deliver the most relevant and compliant AI technology and tools.
• Regulatory advocacy: Finally, we’ll play an active role in engaging with governments to promote effective and interoperable AI regulation. The recently launched Microsoft blueprint for AI governance presents our proposals to governments and other stakeholders for appropriate regulatory frameworks for AI. We have made available a presentation of this blueprint by Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith and a white paper discussing it in detail.

"Support you as you implement your own AI systems responsibly"

• Dedicated resources: We will create a dedicated team of AI legal and regulatory experts in regions around the world as a resource for you to support your implementation of responsible AI governance systems in your businesses.
• Partner support: Many of our partners have already created comprehensive practices to help customers evaluate, test, adopt and commercialize AI solutions, including creating their own responsible AI systems. We are launching a program with selected partners to leverage this expertise to assist our mutual customers in deploying their own responsible AI systems. Today we can announce that PwC and EY are our launch partners for this exciting program.