Anna Felländer has a been engaged with responsible AI from a policy, academic, organizational as well as from a start-up perspective since 2016. Her background is as an economist at the Swedish Ministry of Finance and at the Prime Minister’s Office during the financial crisis 2008. Anna was Chief Economist at Swedbank, one of Sweden’s largest retail banks, until she started her multidisciplinary research on responsible AI as an affiliated researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology in 2016. Anna Felländer is on the board of Ethical AI Governance Group, EAIGG. Since 2018, she is the founder and CEO of anch.AI, a thought leading consultancy and a SaaS B2B platform for responsible AI governance.
It was in 2016 that Anna realised artificial intelligence technology (AI) was becoming the new general-purpose technology: a technology that would drastically impact the economy, businesses, people and society at-large. At the same time, she noticed that AI was also causing a negative externality — a new type of digital pollution. Consumers have opted in to receive the benefit of digitalization, but are simultaneously facing a dark cloud of bias, discrimination and lost autonomy that businesses needed to be held accountable for. In the traditional environmental sustainability model, organisations are held accountable for physical negative externalities, such as air or water pollution, by outraged consumers and sanctions handed down by regulators. Yet no one was holding technology companies accountable for the negative externalities — the digital pollution — of their AI technology. Regulators have had difficulties interpreting AI in order to appropriately regulate it and customers didn’t understand how their data was being used in the black box of AI algorithms.
Anna’s multidisciplinary research group at the Royal Institute of Technology was the origin to anch.AI. Anna founded anch.AI in 2018 to investigate the ethical, legal and societal ramifications of AI. The anch.AI platform is an insight engine with a unique methodology for screening, assessing, mitigating, auditing and reporting exposure to ethical risk in AI solutions. anch.AI believes that all organisations must conform to their ethical values and comply with existing and upcoming regulation in their AI solutions, creating innovations that humans can trust. It is an ethical insurance for companies and organisations.
