Who Is Accountable When AI Fails?

Accountability is a uniquely human ethical priority—one we should embed in the tools we use and the systems that surround them.

As the Chief Procurement Officer of BAM. Inc., Akmal considered himself more progressive than CPOs at other companies, and he had the suite of predictive AI tools to prove it.

“There’s more to procurement than managing constraints and winning in the margins,” he had said to the CFO when making the case for the system. “We need more visibility into our supplier tiers, and we have got to be more nimble.”

The CFO was somewhat less than enthusiastic at first. What was a CPO doing thinking about AI anyway? After some convincing, however, the CFO signed off on the investment and the Chief Technology Officer joined the effort to bring AI to procurement at BAM, Inc.

Several months later, Akmal sat down at his desk and turned on his computer. There were no paper documents to push around, not even a spreadsheet on his desktop. Instead, Akmal opened a procurement program that took in bills of materials, autonomously scoured the networks for availability and cost, and made recommendations for what should be purchased from whom and sent to where. All in a day’s work for an AI-fueled procurement office.

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