AI Data Governance: Ensuring Ethical Use and Security

What is AI Data Governance?

AI data governance encompasses the framework, policies, and practices to ensure the data used in artificial intelligence (AI) technology is managed in an ethical, compliant, and effective manner. While AI governance relates to AI technology as a whole, AI data governance, in particular, focuses on the data used throughout the lifecycle of AI applications and tools. This includes data collection, storage, processing, and usage. 

AI data governance has emerged as a strategy to minimize risks and encourage the ethical use of data in AI technologies and applications. Data is a key part of AI technologies and is used to train models, fine-tune model parameters, create new features, evaluate model performance, and more. Therefore, it’s essential to have a framework to guide how this data is used to avoid common problems such as human error, bias, discrimination, and privacy infringement. 

Why AI in Data Governance is Important

AI in data governance is important for a multitude of reasons, but the top three (in no particular order) are as follows:

• Mitigating risks and ensuring compliance
• Preserving data integrity and accuracy
• Building trust in AI systems

Mitigating risks and ensuring compliance

As mentioned, the use of data in AI presents risks. If people were to use data in AI without any regard for its effects, it would be possible for immoral and discriminatory practices to run rampant. People, as well as society and organizations as a whole, could be negatively affected by these practices. Without any governance, the data used could also be inaccurate and lead practitioners to draw incorrect conclusions. A governance framework would not only help to mitigate some of the societal and organizational risks but also help to ensure that the decisions made based on AI technology are drawn from accurate information. 

In regards to compliance, having AI data governance standards in place allows organizations to comply with relevant laws and regulations. This encourages responsible use of the data and helps avoid fines, penalties, legal action, and other significant disruptions. 

Preserving data integrity and accuracy

Data is the foundation of AI technology, so preserving its integrity and accuracy is important. AI data governance can help organizations achieve this goal by establishing data standards, ensuring high-quality data, managing access and audits, and maintaining the data lifecycle. Prioritizing data integrity and accuracy is a win for organizations, as the better the data that is input into AI models, the better the performance and results. 

Building trust in AI systems

As AI has advanced, both unintentional mishaps and intentional unethical practices have occurred. These incidents have caused people to lose trust in the technology. To avoid further losing trust in the technology and the organizations and people who use it, it’s critical to properly manage the data used to train and inform the models. A governance framework helps build transparency and serves as a reference point for the greater society to understand how they are protected from risks AI presents. AI data governance also serves as a means for holding others responsible for properly using data and technology. 

The Fundamentals of AI Data Governance

The following are the key concepts of AI in data governance at a high level:

Ethics and privacy

Have a plan for identifying and mitigating potential risks of bias in datasets and AI models. Likewise, create a set of ethical guidelines to avoid discrimination, prejudice, and other types of harm.

Data quality control

It is essential to ensure that all data used is accurate, complete, error-free, and consistent. Consider how you’ll preprocess data to achieve these objectives and integrate data from multiple sources. 

Lifecycle management

Plan for how you’ll manage the data across the entire lifecycle from collection to preprocessing, storage, and beyond. Maintain accessible, up-to-date documentation on where you’re sourcing data from and how it’s transformed and managed. 

Security and compliance

How will you protect sensitive data? Plan to implement security measures such as encryption, data anonymization, and strict access control. Likewise, make sure your organization meets laws, regulations, and policies related to AI data usage. 

Data stewardship and ownership

This fundamental concept involves defining the roles and responsibilities of data stewards, managers, and users. It should be coupled with AI data governance policies and standards, plus data traceability documentation and plans for employee training. 

Auditing and reporting

Plan for how you’ll audit the data governance policies and standards you’ve put in place with tracked metrics and regular reports. 

Maintenance, monitoring, and continuous improvement

Consider how you’ll maintain, monitor, and enhance your AI data governance framework based on advancements in the technology. 

Creating AI Data Governance Strategies: How To Get Started

Identify a data governance objective

Start by understanding your primary objective. What are you trying to achieve with an AI data governance framework? What processes do you already have in place to manage this objective? Some potential objectives include improving data quality, ensuring compliance, or mitigating risks. Choose the objective that makes the most sense for your organizational goals and available resources.

Develop a roadmap

To develop your AI data governance roadmap, consider the resources needed to achieve your objective. This may include human resources, systems, tools, technologies, and other investments. It’s wise to assess your current data practices at this stage to identify strengths and weaknesses so you can address them in the roadmap. Some potential components to include in the roadmap are:

• Phases
• Milestones
• Timelines
• Tasks
• Stakeholders And Responsible Parties
• Deadlines

Engage stakeholders and leadership

You will need the support of leadership to enact your AI data governance framework in your organization. Start by getting backing from executive leadership to make this initiative a priority. Next, identify an “evangelist” within the organization who has significant influence and is invested in the project. This person’s influence will go far to garner more buy-in. It’s also wise to create a committee of representatives across departments to communicate the framework to employees and train them on relevant practices. 

Build a governance framework

During this stage, you’ll define stewards of data, managers, and users, as well as involved committees and general roles and responsibilities. You’ll want to create policies and processes for any activities related to AI data governance. 

Plan for Evaluation and Maintenance

Auditing, maintenance, and continuous improvement are key for effective governance of AI data. Consider the metrics you’ll track, how to measure success, who will be responsible for maintenance, and what steps will be required. Plan for regular audits and design mechanisms to take in feedback.

Challenges of AI and Data Governance

As with almost any important initiative undertaken by organizations, there are sure to be some obstacles along the way. Organizations can expect to face some common challenges when working toward AI data governance, including:

Bias

Bias is one of the overarching concerns, as both datasets and algorithms can be biased. When introduced into a model, biased data can lead to inaccurate information, prejudice, and discrimination, as discussed. The real challenge lies in humans making decisions based on this inaccurate information, negatively affecting others and society. 

Quality

People often use the phrase “garbage in, garbage out” when referring to AI technology. Essentially, this concept means poor quality data input into AI models generates poor performance and results. Organizations often find themselves swimming in pools of data, but how much of that data is accurate, complete, and error-free? Though tedious, it’s essential to take steps to clean up and transform data before inputting it into an AI model, or you risk poor performance. 

General complexities

AI technology is difficult for even technical professionals to understand and interpret. A lack of understanding can lead to oversights when attempting to manage risks associated with using data within AI models. Likewise, it also tends to make people more distrustful of the technology in the first place. 

Engagement

Due to the complexity of AI technology and the data used, people may resist changes or be slow to embrace the technology. By that same token, it can be difficult to get everyone on board to govern a technology they don’t fully understand. 

Lack of ownership

Organizations may struggle to identify stakeholders responsible for data governance and its stewardship. It’s important to understand who is accountable for the relevant data’s usage, management, maintenance, and so on to prevent ongoing issues and overlooking potential risks. By that same token, organizations should ensure that the AI tools themselves can be audited. 

Security concerns

If AI data is compromised through a breach or targeted attack, sensitive information may be shared, causing harmful outcomes.  

Integrations

Integrating AI data governance processes with existing systems may require a heavy burden on resources. Likewise, there’s no assurance that all of the tools used to govern AI data will work well together. 

Speed of innovation

As AI technology advances at a rapid pace, those that make the policies, procedures, and regulations to govern its data may lag behind. 

Examples of AI Data Governance

There are some major regulations to enforce AI governance to be aware of, including:

The European Union’s (EU) AI Act. This regulation, proposed by the EU, was passed by the European Parliament on March 13, 2024. It established a common regulatory and legal framework for AI usage within the EU and created an EU AI Board. It is the first comprehensive regulation of AI by a major regulator anywhere.  

In the United States, the White House released an executive order for an AI bill of rights. However, there is currently no serious AI legislation in the United States. Several states have taken the lead on AI-related legislation, including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. The majority of these state-level data privacy laws include provisions to regulate profiling through AI. 

As far as use cases, there are a variety of ways AI data governance can be enacted across industries. For example, in healthcare, patient privacy and compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is of the utmost concern. If an organization leverages AI to diagnose patients, creating an AI data governance framework that focuses on privacy, compliance, and transparency is important. In the case of retail, AI can be an excellent tool for making product recommendations. However, it’s critical to keep customer data private and secure. Data governance frameworks for this use case would also want to consider buyer consent and the potential to introduce bias into the AI model. 

AI technology could also be used for fraud detection in the banking and financial industries. Because this use case involves sensitive, transactional data, a data governance framework is essential. Some core components to consider would be data anonymity, encryption, access controls, data origin tracking, and the potential for bias. 

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