“I think the responsibility of stakeholders like ourselves or businesses like us is to both anticipate and adapt to regulation versus ignore it or expect not to have regulation,” Satya Nadella commented at the main stage at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting last week. The Microsoft CEO went on to say that “there’s a lot of regulation coming out of the European Union which I think are going to set standards”.
The CEO of my former employer is commenting on something that I’m certain that we will see a lot more of in the coming years. Clearly, there are industries with heavy regulatory burdens to attend to, such as within pharma and financial services. This has in many ways formed organizations within those industries when it comes to ensuring that the requirements are upheld. In particular, I’m thinking of the need for cross-group collaboration and control and I’m certain that many financial institutions and pharma companies can bear witness of how they have had to transform and build a compliance and reporting muscle internally.
One example of such stronger and standard-setting regulation that Mr. Nadella is referring to is the AI Act which is currently moving its way through the EU legislative machinery in order to be a regulation with direct effect similar to the GDPR. And in the same way that the GDPR applies to most companies and institutions in one way or the other, it is clear that the AI Act will be of very broad relevance and not limited to the tech industry. It will thus be of importance to most, if not all, industries and sectors to step up and build a cross-group compliance and reporting muscle internally for the intelligence tools they need and are expected to procure, develop, deploy and use.
With this in mind, I’m particularly glad to see that we now announce the Enterprise version of the Ethical AI Governance Platform, including an EU Regulation Health Check. With the license, you will be able to build a tailor-made overview and control platform for your whole organization in order to maintain a responsible AI compliance and reporting muscle internally. This will no doubt build trust to your brand and reputation and enable your whole organization and your people to harness the benefits of digitalization with intelligence and integrity.
