[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, everyone. The Business Ethics Leadership alliance has questions and once again we have answers. I'm your host, Bill Coffin. Welcome to another Bella Ask episode of the Ethicast.
One of the best benefits of being a member of the Business Ethics Leadership alliance was, or Bella, is that if you have any questions at all about ethics and compliance, you can submit them to Bella's concierge service and one of our internal experts will provide an answer and direct you to a helpful resource for more information. Many of these requests speak to broad challenges facing Bella members and by extension, the wider ethics and compliance profession. That's why we're using this show to thematically respond to high level questions from the Bella community. And joining us once again to answer those questions is Bella chair and Erica Salmon Byrne. Erica, as always, it's wonderful to see you back on the show. Thanks for joining us.
[00:00:56] Speaker B: Absolutely. Bill, it is my pleasure to be back on the show because it means that people continue to ask us questions.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: Well, our next question for you is an AI question and it reads, what goes into developing a good AI policy? And if this is not the question of the year, I do not know what is?
[00:01:13] Speaker B: Bill, the fact that we have managed to record as many Bella asks as we have, that we have gotten as many velociraptor references in as we have, and we have not yet answered this question was astonishing to me. When I saw this one show up in the list, I said to myself, how have Bill and I not already answered this question? But in fact, we haven't. And part of the, part of the reason why we haven't is because, you know, we've been working with the Bella community over the course of the last several months on a series of meetups related to AI because quite frankly, lots of companies are struggling to try to figure out what a good policy looks like. And I think part of the reason for that, Bill, is people keep trying to have a single policy. And I have to say this is one of those topics that I don't think. And based on the guidance that we've published for the Bella community, based on those meetups, it can't really be a single policy because it's so dynamic. Right? Right. This is an area that is changing so regularly. This is an area that is changing so significantly. And so really thinking about what does my written guidance to employees need to look like on this topic is something that you have to break into tranches. So here's the way we're thinking about it right now at Ethisphere and I share it with our listeners as one kind of framework. The first is ethical use of AI principles. So if you are putting AI in your product, for example, or you have a need to communicate with your stakeholders about what your approach to using AI is going to be, that's what this document could be. These were the ethical use of AI principles. These were some of the first things we saw companies coming out with when AI kind of burst onto the scene from a generative AI large language model perspective was this, this idea of, okay, we're going to put some, some general principles together that are going to become part of our decision making framework. So that's one bucket. We then see a good use case for something that would be a little bit more static, which is kind of an AI development and use policy. So you're going to cross reference other policies and principles and guidance. You can look at things like definitions of terms, expectations for employee behavior, prohibited uses of AI, the kinds of things that go in a policy. And so again, I just, you know, I like to remind people, we know how this muscle works, right? We know how to do this. And then the most dynamic piece is going to need to be your guideline documentation. So you know, who are, what's the workflow, what's the approval process, who's responsible for reviewing a new use of AI? What about third party vendor contracts that have AI? You know, if, if we're working with a vendor that has AI in their product, who's signing off on that? Like all of those things that need to change very rapidly and kind of keep up with the development of the technology, that's where your guidance comes into play. So those are just a couple of kind of suggestions of the way in which you might think about it. But really it should be a situation where you don't want to be doing this, trying to do this all in one document because you're going to need to update pieces of this so regularly that you want that to be something separate that is cross referenced, that is called guidance.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: As we've seen companies struggle to integrate AI into their operations and they're building framework policies around this. Do you see 2025 as being a year with such breathless development on the policy front as you saw it on 2024?
[00:04:47] Speaker B: Yeah, it was, you know, as soon as ChatGPT burst into the consciousness, you know, fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus Bill, it seemed like every single vendor we ever worked with and every company I ever engaged with suddenly had AI. And you know, an algorithm is great. We've had Algorithms forever. Right? That's not. It's. It's. So some of it was. Was a. A marketing lens.
You know, look, it's. The technology is here now, and it's incumbent upon us to figure out how to look at it both as a risk and an opportunity. And so I do think part of the reason why we're getting this question now, why we're seeing 70, 75, 80, 90 Bella members showing up for these monthly meetups that we're doing, which are really just an opportunity for Bella members to talk to each other directly, talk to us about what they're focused on, what they're thinking about, what they're working on as it pertains to the responsible use of AI. I think the reason we're seeing all of that is because people are trying to figure out how to live with this new technology. Just like we had to figure out how to live with ephemeral messaging, and we've had to figure out how to live with, you know, hybrid work environments, and we figured out how to live with email back in the day, you know, the Internet. We're going to work through this. This is a new. This is an evolution of a technology that is going to present us with risks. It's going to present us with opportunities. And we all just need to take a deep breath and try to figure out where are our guardrails, who's responsible for maintaining them, who's got to follow them and care about them, and where do we go from here?
[00:06:19] Speaker A: Well, Erica, as always, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your insights with us on these really important topics. I know everyone in the Bella community truly appreciates it.
[00:06:27] Speaker B: Oh, Bill, it's my pleasure. And to all those Bella members out there that keep coming to us with questions, you have made it possible for Bill and I to record way more of these than we ever thought we were going to be able to when we first kicked off Bella Asks. So please, please keep the questions coming and I promise you we'll come back and give you our thoughts.
[00:06:45] Speaker A: To learn more about Bella, please visit ethisphere.combella to request guest access to the member resource hub and to speak with the Bella Engagement Director. And if you have a question that you would like answered on Bella Asks, be sure to use the Bella Concierge service and we'll get to your question just as soon as we can. I'm Bill Coffin, and this has been a special Bella Asks episode of the Ethicast. For more episodes, please please Visit the Ethisphere YouTube
[email protected] ethisphere and if this is your first time enjoying the show, please make sure to like and subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thanks for joining us, and until next time, remember, strong ethics is good business.
