Sixty-one percent of executives surveyed by PwC said creating transparent, explainable, provable AI methods was a step they planned to take in 2019.
Krishna Gade, a former engineering manager of Facebook’s News Feed, and Amit Paka, who worked on Samsung’s shopping apps, saw a need for a platform that could clearly explain to company shareholders how AI models make decisions. They founded Fiddler Labs to do just that.
Samsung used machine-learning systems to recommend products to users, but it was difficult to measure return on investment and compare new models to older ones, Paka told CNBC. At Facebook, Gade’s challenge was measuring how well the News Feed was working on any given day. "We needed to build tools and platforms to unlock this thing and provide those insights to an engineer all the way to an executive within Facebook," he said.
A February 2018 survey from McKinsey & Co. indicates that the new company is on to something. Of the 1,646 professionals surveyed, 24% thought that uncertain or low expectations for return on AI investment were significant barriers to their organization’s adoption of AI.