ABBYY initiative for trustworthy artificial intelligence

A growing number of technology leaders expect fair, transparent and ethical AI systems in order to fuel the continued adoption of AI and spur innovation. In fact, by 2025, Gartner estimates 30% of large enterprise and government contracts for the purchase of digital products and services that incorporate AI will require the use of explainable and ethical AI. Furthermore, three-quarters of consumers say they won’t buy from unethical companies, while 86% say they’re more loyal to ethical companies.

As AI becomes ubiquitous across consumer and enterprise high-value and large-scale uses and more open source tools become available for digitising data, the ethical use of accessing and training data is imperative. Therefore, ABBYY made public its core guiding principles on developing, maintaining and promoting trustworthy AI technologies – and advocates for other technology leaders to do the same.

“Innovation and ethics go hand in hand. As the use of AI grows, it is important for technology leaders to adhere to and promote the use of technologies that are transparent, fair, unbiased and respect data privacy,” commented Anthony Macciola, Chief Innovation Officer at ABBYY. “By adhering to high standards with regards to the performance, transparency and accuracy of our products, we are able to deliver solutions that have a tremendous impact for our customers.”

ABBYY, whose Digital Intelligence solutions leverage AI technologies including machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), neural networks, and optical character recognition (OCR) to transform data, affirmed its commitment to the following principles and advocates for other leading technology organisations to also commit to trustworthy AI standards:

• Incorporating a privacy-by-design principle as an integral part of its software development processes.
• Protecting confidential customer and partner data.
• Developing AI technologies that meet or exceed industry standards for performance, accuracy and security.
• Empowering customers and partners to successfully implement digital transformation in their organisations by delivering solutions that provide a greater understanding of content and processes.
• Providing visibility into the performance characteristics and metrics of its technologies, as well as providing opportunities for product feedback.
• Delivering AI technologies that are socially and economically beneficial.
• Fostering a culture that promotes the ethical use of AI and its social utility. 

“AI has the power to yield significant social and economic benefit,” continued Macciola. “With ethics in mind, we have the ability to transform the future in a manner that promotes innovation, accelerates technological advancements, and augments human intelligence, creativity and capabilities responsibly.”