Des Moines Business Record: 3 Companies Share Insight into Forming AI Governance

Lean TECHniques’ CEO, Brandon Carlson, and AI Strategy Lead, Kristina Colson, recently shared insights and best practices with the Des Moines Business Record on how to best approach AI governance within an organization. Carlson and Colson are featured alongside Principal Financial Group’s CIO, Kathy Kay, and EMC Insurance’s Vice President of Digital Services, Damon Youmans.

An excerpt from the article, written by Sarah Diehn, is below. Read the full article here.

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As a technology consulting business, part of Lean TECHniques’ impetus to create AI principles was to equip their teams to help clients understand and navigate this new technology, said Kristina Colson, Lean TECHniques’ AI strategy lead.  

The dawn of generative AI prompted a lot of questions from clients, so they needed to develop some common language and principles to guide decisions made across the company.

Colson said Lean TECHniques’ governance focuses on providing employees the resources needed to make decisions independently to fit in with their culture as an agile organization.

“It’s the ‘lean’ in Lean TECHniques. It’s keeping things lightweight and lean. We don’t want a massive decision framework because that’s just going to slow things down,” she said.

Their process of collaboratively creating governance was crowdsourcing ideas from people across the organization with various backgrounds. They reviewed materials, like other companies’ AI principles and the European Union’s AI Act.  

“We came together in a workshop session where we distilled the pieces from all these different sources together into which of these things do we also care about? How do we frame it in a way that it aligns with how we already think about software development, or how we already think of product development,” Colson said.

Their principles revolve around fairness, transparency and accountability, including statements that Lean Techniques will proactively reduce cultural, social or other biases and prioritize transparency into the functioning and decision-making of AI algorithms. 

The consultancy also created an internal AI use policy to help employees evaluate risk when using AI tools in their work. Lean TECHniques founder and CEO Brandon Carlson said he and Colson were passionate about having flexibility in the policy, especially as AI evolves.

“We don’t want to stifle people, we don’t want to limit people’s choice or any of those kinds of things, but we want to at least help them understand what the risks are that we’re trying to mitigate and not be as prescriptive … you need your team members to be exploring these things, and you need them to be able to experiment,” Carlson said.

A core principle for Lean TECHniques, EMC and Principal is “human in the loop,” meaning a human verifies the accuracy of work done by AI.

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Read the full article here.