How Companies Can Take a Global Approach to AI Ethics

Many efforts to build an AI ethics program overlook an important fact: ethics vary across cultural contexts. Ideas about what’s right and wrong in one culture may not translate to a fundamentally different context, and even when there is alignment, there may be important differences in ethical reasoning at work—cultural norms, religious traditions, and so on—that need to be considered. Because regulations surrounding AI and related data are rarely uniform across geographies, alignment can be difficult. To address this, companies need to develop a context-aware global AI ethics model that prioritizes collaboration with local teams and stakeholders and delegates decision-making authority to those local teams. This is especially important if their operations span multiple geographies.