Risks African businesses should be wary of while embarking on their AI transformation

As African businesses embark on their AI transformation initiatives, it is imperative to pay attention to the associated risks with AI as these risks can have negative cost and data privacy implications.

In this article, I will highlight and discuss in detail the risks and how you can mitigate them.

Biases can exclude certain customers during predictions and impact the experience of customers. Ensure your intent is fair to all.

Ensure you implement the relevant guardrails to mitigate against this. Guardrails are a set of configurable rules and policies that help mitigate against adversarial inputs and attacks. There are tools for this or you can build your custom guardrail tool if you have the capacity internally. Test thoroughly during the AI alignment stage and also use AI monitoring tools to get visibility of your AI solution to proactively resolve issues as they occur.

To save costs for your business, implement key guardrails to ensure your AI assistant blocks out-of-context questions. This can be done via advanced prompt engineering or other solutions.

Sensitive company data can be leaked unintentionally by employees who use these tools which the major AI providers can use for their model retraining. The fallout here can result in model predictions to strangers using your company’s sensitive data.

Businesses need to set up and enforce strict policies and staff training on the responsible and ethical use of these tools in the course of their jobs.

Conclusion 

Supercharging your internal business processes or products using AI can be very exciting and rewarding to the business, employees, and their customers but the effects of these risks can negatively impact the transformation project and cost you even more.

Implement a proper AI alignment process at the end of your AI transformation project to ensure your solution aligns with the set objectives. Implement extensive monitoring to get quicker insights and be proactive in addressing these risks and other issues.