Accenture and AWS want to help firms spin up AI ‘responsibly’

The Accenture Responsible Artificial Intelligence Platform powered by AWS, to give it its full name, is supposed to help enterprises assess, test, build and manage AI ‘responsibly and safely’.

In pursuit of this noble aim, the platform will help clients create an ongoing cycle of monitoring, testing and remediating for compliance throughout the organisation, we’re told, offering a unified view of assets, open-source tools and industry standards as AI is incorporated into workflows and processes.

It will allow business leaders to assess their organization’s ‘readiness or maturity level’ for AI and perform risk screenings using benchmark data from multiple industries, so says the release, and ultimately help them to ‘easily understand what they need to do in order to identify specific AI risks, to develop appropriate risk mitigation approaches and to support compliance with specific fast-changing regulations.’ 

Presenting their credentials to be able to do this job, we’re told the platform brings together Accenture’s curated learnings from more than 1,000 generative AI client projects, and AWS’ portfolio of AI services such as Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker, alongside other business flavoured tools like AWS Control Tower, Amazon DataZone and AWS Observability tools.

“Our work with AWS is focused on helping our clients establish and embed responsible AI at scale, closing the gap between principles and action,” said Arnab Chakraborty, chief responsible AI officer, Accenture. “For the first time, Accenture plans to offer comprehensive end-to-end services spanning AI governance setup, AI risk assessment, generative AI testing, ongoing compliance support, regulation management and security for AWS workloads.”

Vasi Philomin, vice president of generative AI at AWS added: “With our expanded collaboration, Accenture Responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI) Platform powered by AWS will helps customers adopt and scale AI rapidly and with confidence. This platform will make it easier for customers to use our growing portfolio of responsible AI solutions, and provides a holistic assessment as well as ongoing monitoring and testing to help clients with their compliance obligations in a rapidly evolving regulatory environment. With Accenture, we are empowering more customers to experiment and innovate safely with generative AI.”

Accenture claims only 2% of companies have ‘fully operationalised responsible AI across their organizations’ – which seems like a bit of a slippery metric. But then the whole thing is such a wild west of a sector at the moment it would be a surprise if nobody was making some mistakes in the global stampede to get some sort of competitive or efficiency edge through the AI tools flowing onto the market, which it’s probably safe to say are not yet deeply understood at the boardroom level.

Companies that are really going to town in tooling up their operations with AI are to some degree going into uncharted waters, so getting some steering based on best practice from some of the firms involved in producing the tools seems like a solid enough pitch.

Whether or not this platform, or any one of the other consultancy type services that are bound to crop up over the coming years, can see significantly further down the road in order to traverse any really big macro-level calamities that might come as a result of fusing AI into the DNA of global capitalism, is another question.