Does your AI ethics team have real power? – Protocol

Hello and welcome to Protocol Enterprise! Today: How Salesforces AI ethics team manages internal and third-party AI dilemmas, Intel makes a big investment in its foundry business and the latest funding deals in enterprise tech.

Data silos are a major challenge for 90% of IT leaders, according to MuleSofts latest report. And that number hasnt changed since MuleSoft conducted the survey a year ago. Data may be everywhere, but that doesnt mean it's integrated.

When Salesforces engineers were incorporating tools that use natural-language processing and machine learning to analyze peoples sentiments toward products or brands in social media or reviews, they discovered a problem. The system automatically labeled content featuring words such as gay, Black or Muslim as negative. It even happened if the statements around them were positive, as in, Im gay and proud.

Kathy Baxter and her Ethics by Design team inside Salesforce stepped in to assess the algorithmic tool, but despite the potential for discrimination, some product management decision-makers at the company still wanted to roll out the product in beta anyway to get customer feedback.

Some of the companies that are subject to the most intense scrutiny of their AI practices say they have embedded ethics into product development.

But for many companies, putting AI principles into practice is not as common, and many are looking to government to create regulations to guide that process.

Still, Salesforce isnt just what is built by Salesforce. Like many cloud platforms, Salesforce is a dense forest of software applications and tools.

Education is the companys primary tool for fostering more ethical practices among partners in its sprawling app marketplace. She also said in 2022 the companys account reps are expected to offer customers additional AI ethics education and services.

For now, it's a nice-to-have, it's a pretty rare thing to have someone on staff dedicated to ethics in development of products or services, Baxter said. But in a few years, it will be madness not to have at least one of these in your company.

Dataiku is the only AI platform that connects data and doers, enabling anyone to transform data into real business results from the mundane to the moonshot. Because AI can do so much, but there's no soul in the machine, only in front of it. Without you, it's just data.

Learn more

As part of Intels bid to regain its one-time leadership position in chip manufacturing, the company announced a series of steps on Monday aimed to support its contract chip business, Intel Foundry Services. Intel said that it had launched an ecosystem alliance called Accelerator designed to help companies bring new chips to market, and a $1 billion fund to support companies building tech to support the foundry ecosystem.

Intel said the fund would focus on helping companies interested in tech around modular products, and support an open chiplet platform adding several different types of chips to a single package, compared with cramming a bunch of designs onto one chip.

Foundry customers are rapidly embracing a modular design approach to differentiate their products and accelerate time to market, CEO Pat Gelsinger said in a statement.

To support the companys efforts, Intel said it would support designs that use multiple instruction set architectures, or ISAs, including x86, Arm and RISC-V. The company said that a key part of its contract chip strategy is a broad range of tech offerings, including RISC-V. Intel said it had joined RISC-V International, the consortium that oversees the RISC-V open-source architecture.

Max A. Cherney (email | twitter)

The cloud let chief information officers become more strategic and focused on building business value instead of managing IT as a cost center. Then the pandemic thrust CIOs into an even more central role: They became crucial leaders when managing remote work, navigating abrupt changes in business operations and accelerating digital transformation.

Flexport raised $935 million from Shopify and other investors at a valuation of $8 billion for its global logistics platform.

Chargebee was valued at $3.5 billion after raising $250 million from Tiger Global and Sequoia Global for its subscription management software.

Productboard was valued at $1.7 billion after raising $125 million for its product management software.

Loadsmart raised $200 million to automate logistics, valuing the company at $1.3 billion.

TTTech Auto raised $285 million at a $1 billion valuation for its automated driving software.

Butterfly was valued at $1 billion after raising $125 million to provide employers with a digital benefits platform.

Dataiku is the only AI platform that connects data and doers, enabling anyone to transform data into real business results from the mundane to the moonshot. Because AI can do so much, but there's no soul in the machine, only in front of it. Without you, it's just data.

Learn more

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Does your AI ethics team have real power? - Protocol