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Organisations routinely automate decisions

Data drives decision making in organisations.

Business process automation allows data to be analysed, and decisions to be made without human intervention.

The key question is how the decision is made, and the level of accuracy for the result.

How Does your Business Analyse Data and Automate Decisions?

Rules based automation has been the traditional approach to decision making. It produces absolutely consistent answers, and is transparent and understandable.

Machine learning and Large Language Models do not operate in the same way. They often produce unpredictable answers, and false information.

56 % of businesses claim to already be using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve their business operations.[1]

4 Risks to Consider – Automated Decision Making

Risk #1 – Data Quality

• Garbage in = garbage out
• Data quality and relevance are critically important to any decision making process.
• What steps do you take to verify information?
• What opportunities are there for people to review, correct, or update information?

Risk #2 – Transparency

• Can you audit individual decisions?
• What records do you collect and archive for each decision?
• Can you retrieve the original input data and the resulting outputs?
• Do you rely upon a “black box” or a third party to determine a decision?

Risk #3 – Accuracy

• Rules based automation typically uses static rules and definitions.
• Demonstrating decision accuracy is straight forward, and manageable.
• AI based systems need to be trained.
• Achieving comparable accuracy can require very large data sets, and a lot of ongoing effort and expertise.

Risk #4 – Privacy

• Are you collecting appropriate data about your stakeholders / customers?
• Are the inputs to decisions appropriate?
• What safeguards have you put in place?

[1] Source: Forbes Advisor Survey 2024