In a recent article at the KMU Magazine, SCRAI co-founder Ricardo Chavarriaga discusses the benefits of adopting Responsible AI and how small and medium-sized enterprises can overcome hindering factors and turn the AI potential into business and societal value.
Responsible AI as an opportunity for Swiss SMEs
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of Switzerland’s economy. SMEs make up over 99% of the commercial companies and create two-thirds of the jobs in Switzerland. Artificial intelligence is touted as a gamechanger for SMEs by providing better quality, and increased efficiency. The growing market for AI-based innovation is a great opportunity for Swiss SMEs, given the access to highly qualified talent, economic stability, and global recognition. However, successful adoption of AI by SMEs is hindered by multiple barriers including technological complexity, uncertainty about regulatory requirements and limited resources.
Barriers to adoption
Development or adoption of AI-based systems, differs from other technology-based solutions in multiple ways. The power of AI systems comes at the price of limited reliability (e.g. hallucinations), lack of transparency, and non-deterministic behaviour. These characteristics makes it more difficult to evaluate their performance and manage risks. Here are key hindering factors for adoption:
Lack the technical and operational capacity to understand the impact of AI systems.
Tension between developing and maintaining in-house solutions or to rely on third-party solutions
Uncertainty about legal frameworks and user’s expectations
The Business Impact of Responsible AI
Successful adoption of Responsible AI practices can offer SMEs reduction of costs and complexity of the assessment process, facilitating risk management and compliance; Foster transparency and trust signalling to downstream developers and clients; facilitate procurement processes by enabling structured assessing process; and Accelerating time-to-market for AI-based solutions.
Enabling factors
Streamlined public funding mechanisms and further encouragement for private investors.
Access to performant, reliable infrastructure for computing power and data management that fulfils requirements for data sovereignty, cyber-security protection, and fair pricing mechanisms.
Access to technical and governance tools and services that can support SME AI development processes.
Strategic empowerment
Support for strategy development is the major factor for enabling successful AI adoption for SMEs. The ability to identify the business value that AI can create for the organisations, informed by a clear identification of the pain points and accurate assessment of the current capacity enables the SMEs to ask the right questions and choose the best support on their AI journey. Establishing a clear process to identify trade-off between the incentives and opportunities for specific AI-use cases and their inherent cost and risks, enables appropriate planning, execution and scaling of AI-related solutions that are effective, sustainable and impactful.
Through its services, SCRAI provides actionable support on the decision of AI strategy and governance, adoption of responsible AI practices and increase AI literacy. Let’s build Responsible AI together.
Note: This article is part of a series on AI produced in collaboration with the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW) and the Swiss AI Research Overview Platform (SAIROP). SAIROP promotes exchange between academia, industry, and society, highlights Swiss AI expertise, and provides guidance within the dynamic AI ecosystem.
