What is explainable AI?

Explainable AI is a key component in bridging the gap between sophisticated algorithms and human understanding. However, it is one part of a broader commitment to Responsible AI that builds trust, ensures regulatory compliance and helps organisations align AI with core values.

Explainable AI focuses on key principles that build understanding:

• Transparency: disclosing how the AI feature works and what data is being used
• Interpretability: understanding why predictions or decisions were made

AI models exist on a transparency spectrum, from highly interpretable to difficult-to-interpret “black box” systems.

• Black box models are characterised by their complex inner workings, making their decision-making process difficult for humans to interpret or predict. Their complexity means they require specific safeguards and parameters based on the use case they are designed to fulfil. Workday addresses this by providing clear documentation for customers, such as AI fact sheets, to promote transparency.
• Interpretable AI has a simpler architecture that’s easier to grasp.
• Explainable AI offers the highest transparency, showing both how and why decisions are made.

The evolution of AI tells a story of transformation.

The groundwork for AI with theoretical frameworks started in the 1950s, introducing the Turing test and early concepts like chatbots and robots. This period was followed by the “AI winter”, but by the ’80s and ’90s, we saw AI stepping out into the real world through practical applications. This was a period of exploration into how AI could address real-world problems for businesses and society, making it clear that AI held immense potential. 

Workday entered the scene in 2005, transforming enterprise technology as the pioneer cloud-first company in human capital management and financials, laying the foundation for continued innovation.

The importance of explainable AI in today’s business environment.

A growing dependency on AI for supporting critical business decisions spans all sectors, from healthcare to manufacturing and retail. Yet, the rapid expansion of AI's use increases the potential for unintended negative consequences.

Comparing explainable AI vs black box AI models.

Black box models are characterised by their complex inner workings, making them difficult to interpret. This necessitates a focus on robust risk mitigation and governance practices. Bias is a risk in AI systems that must be actively measured and mitigated, based on how the technology might be used.

While interpretable models may be simpler to audit, highly complex models are often required for optimal performance. The choice between transparency and pure performance depends on the specific business use case and risk profile.

In enterprise applications, human oversight is critical for consequential decisions. For example, a high-performance model may predict complex financial outcomes, but the final decision to act is retained by the human user.

Organisations often use a combination of different model types to achieve specific goals. Regardless of the model chosen, implementing comprehensive safeguards and human-in-the-loop controls is necessary to mitigate associated risks and ensure trust.

Explainable AI benefits for businesses.

The business benefits of explainable AI practices and solutions shouldn't be overlooked. These solutions address stakeholder scepticism, making AI easier to trust and adopt.

Explainability is a domain of practices and solutions that provide transparency by design, helping organisations align with ethical standards and meet emerging compliance requirements. 

The ability to easily interpret and receive feedback on AI decisions strengthens risk management by enabling earlier identification and correction of issues, supporting the AI model's continuous improvement.

Addressing explainable AI challenges during implementation.

Even with a solid strategy, implementing explainable AI practices presents real challenges for organisations of any size. The underlying AI models themselves can be highly sophisticated and complex, so the goal is to make a high-performing model interpretable without sacrificing performance.

Knowledge gaps introduce another challenge. Organisations must create teams with AI expertise and domain knowledge to create meaningful explanations. They need to provide enough information without overwhelming their non-technical stakeholders. Balancing detail with performance can present challenges without the right people in place. 

Workday’s approach ensures that explanations are built directly into each AI feature and embedded into the natural flow of work, streamlining the integration of explainable AI into business processes.

Integrating Explainable AI into Your Responsible AI (RAI) Governance.

Implementing explainable AI begins by aligning its practices with your organisation’s broader Responsible AI governance and assessing its specific transparency and interpretability needs. 

When incorporating explainable AI, consider the ethical and legal requirements, such as how to ensure compliance with existing laws and regulations. You should also determine the necessary scope: whether explanations are needed for every AI decision, or only for those having a major impact on the organisation.

Because AI risks vary based on context and characteristics, explainable AI applications often differ across business functions. Explanations must be tailored to different stakeholders – executives, regulators and end-users – which requires the active participation of diverse subject matter experts. 

Establishing a governance process is key. This should include developing a clear governance framework and culture that operationalises AI ethics principles. A key outcome of this framework is establishing robust documentation standards, which is a core component of regulatory compliance, including how AI decisions are generated and validated. This documentation ensures transparency and accountability in your AI development and deployment activities.

Explainable AI success KPIs and other metrics.

Explainable AI success hinges on measured levels of transparency. Can users correctly interpret AI explanations? Stakeholders should be able to understand and apply practical solutions based on explanations. Rising trust and confidence levels indicate users are more likely to act on explainable AI-driven insights. If this metric is low, it can indicate that trust is still an issue.

Meeting industry or regulatory transparency standards comes down to compliance verification metrics – transparency, interpretability, explainability and accountability. The AI model must explain its decision-making process in an easily interpretable way. Accountability means AI models are responsible for their decisions and actions.

Other metrics include the explainable improvement rate of the AI model. This ties in with accountability. Do the explanations help identify and fix any model weaknesses? Measuring explainable AI success can improve business outcomes by improving decisions from human-AI collaborations.

Workday is ensuring AI is transparent in business operations.

The approach to explainable AI at Workday focuses on embedding practices into its solutions. Users will find explainability built into each AI feature across the platform. Workday's commitment is to innovate with integrity. Workday strives to ensure that accelerated innovation is synonymous with trusted innovation by balancing computational efficiency and model interpretability through its Responsible AI foundation.

By ensuring transparency across all explanations, Workday is helping to inspire trust and confidence in explainable AI. The built-in features work seamlessly with most IT infrastructure, ensuring a smooth implementation and user experience.

Customers such as P.F. Chang’s use explainable AI technology to transform its HR and finance departments. By adopting the AI-driven Workday platform, P.F. Chang’s has been able to unify departments within the organisation, enabling real-time insights and contributing to a more efficient structure. 

Explainable AI and its future in enterprise technology.

One emerging technique is concept-based explanations, where AI models are trained to identify and explain their decisions using human-understandable concepts rather than raw features.

Advancements in techniques are making explainable AI models more accountable and transparent. This continuous evolution supports organisations in adapting to and anticipating the evolving regulatory landscape and its implications.

Explainability is crucial for building the trust needed to scale AI adoption responsibly. By making explanations transparent, stakeholders are more likely to trust the technology and its uses in business. Workday takes a proactive approach to responsible AI by actively engaging with lawmakers to help shape workable regulations, ensuring safe and ethical development for customers.

Workday ensures accelerated innovation is synonymous with trusted innovation by embedding Responsible AI practices to amplify human potential.