As businesses continue to adopt AI for many of their company’s operations, such as hiring, marketing, and customer service, C-suite executives find themselves facing a question that receives far less attention than the technology itself: What decisions should AI actually be allowed to make? Mike Switzer interviews Christopher Law, head of lifecycle marketing at Happy Money in Columbia, SC.
TRANSCRIPT:
Switzer: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the South Carolina Business Review. This is Mike Switzer. As businesses continue to adopt AI for many of their company's operations, such as hiring, marketing and, and especially customer service, it seems C suite executives find themselves facing a question that receives far less attention than the technology itself. And that is, what decisions should AI actually be allowed to make? Christopher Law is head of Life Cycle Marketing at Happy Money, and he joins us by phone now from his office in Columbia. Christopher, welcome to the program.
Law: Thanks for having me, Mike.
Switzer: All right, and so where you are working now, Happy Money, is there a lot of AI use going on?
Law: yes, we have a couple of interesting use cases of AI at Happy Money we'll be able to talk about soon. We have an enterprise suite here. and my work there focuses on understanding what people need and making our communication useful and relevant to them. that keeps me focused on questions that run throughout the book. Is technology actually helping the people on the other side of that interaction? not just helping us with efficiency?
Switzer: All right, and so you mentioned a book. What prompted you to author a book on this topic of AI?
Law: The book actually draws from my independent doctoral research. My career has been in banking, fintech, and, digital customer experience, helping organizations make technology useful to people and increase communication between them. And my doctoral research at Muskingum University focused on artificial intelligence in financial services. Throughout my 15 year career in this, I kept coming back to one question. How can we be accountable for a decision if we don't understand how it was made or the technology behind it? So I wrote the book out of my dissertation, trying to help leaders answer that question in their everyday work.
Switzer: All right, so the book, is out now.
Law: The book will come out, January 11th.
Switzer: Tell us what it is that you have discovered about these executives who are facing AI right now.
Law: Executives today are authorizing tools that are making decisions on their behalf. Scheduling an interview is different than deciding who gets one. Imagine, artificial intelligence ranks 100 applicants, and a manager only reviews the top 10. The person is making a final choice. But artificial intelligence already shaped who's getting the chance. Calling that automation doesn't remove consequences or reputational risk to a company. So who checks those 90 applicants the manager never sees? You can hold a human accountable for bias or decision making, but what about a tool making that decision? So if the vendor owns the tool, but a manager procures that tool, and an employee uses that tool, who holds the accountability in that position?
Switzer: Okay, and so who does?
Law: That's what the book tries to help answer and tries to give leaders back that accountability. Authentic Intelligence, which is the name of this book, gives leaders a model to help ask those questions and gives them the opportunity to ask a handful of questions for who this tool might impact, be it employees, customers, vendors, so that they can properly understand and measure accountability and recourse for those impacted audiences and know how this tool will shape the decisions that they're held responsible for.
Switzer: Do you see this, making a lot of executives nervous?
Law: I think most executives today want to go into an interview and say they made a decision. They don't want to pass the buck to artificial intelligence. And especially for some of these reputational risk issues, we're seeing lawsuits for workday that's ongoing now. Or, there's a lawsuit that was settled in 2023 for iTutor Group for a quarter of a million dollars or more on bias in hiring. An executive or a CEO in South Carolina doesn't want to say, well, a tool made that call. They're going to be held accountable and that should make people nervous if they're not aware of what decisions are being made on their behalf.
Switzer: Christopher, what is the number one thing right now you would tell our small business owners as an action step right now regarding AI in their company?
Law: I would recommend picking one use of AI. Your company is either looking at implementing or is already doing and writing down what it may do and what a person must decide now. Name who checks the work and who can stop it and then test what happens when the system is wrong. Can someone spot that mistake and correct it? If you start with a limited use case and review those mistakes a long time with the time saved, it should match the stakes. You should have a proper human in the loop making those decisions.
Switzer: Well, Christopher, thank you so much for spending time with us today.
Law: No problem.
Switzer: Christopher Law is head of Life Cycle Marketing at Happy Money in Columbia. Remember, you can hear this show again at our webpage, SouthCarolinaPublicRadio.org, and you can hear us again wherever you find podcasts. With the South Carolina Business Review, this is Mike Switzer.
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