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22 Apr 2025

Leveraging ethical AI and digital innovation to drive social value

Guest blog by Ritesh Nandurkar, Digital Marketing Associate at VE3 #techUKSocialValueWeek

Ritesh Nandurkar

Ritesh Nandurkar

Digital Marketing Associate, VE3

We are in a fast-paced transformative era, where artificial intelligence (AI) is serving as the driving force towards digital innovation. Enterprises, businesses, and governments across every nation are adopting AI-driven solutions for digital innovation, and the UK is no different. In the UK, enterprises and the government nurture AI to deliver social value and address key challenges. 

Various research organisations are speculating on its growth, considering the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) across different sectors. Statista reported that the market value of AI will  move from $243.72 billion USD in 2025 to $826.73 billion USD by 2030. That change reflects a compound annual growth rate of 27.67% from 2025 to 2030. This article explores how enterprises should leverage ethical AI for digital innovation and drive social value.

What is Ethical AI? 

Ethical AI is used to develop, deploy, and employ AI across various systems, keeping moral principles, ethics, societal values, and legal standards. It emphasises creating AI and ML solutions that are accountable, transparent, non-biased, and fair. Ethical AI also focuses on the benefits of individuals and society. It determines an objective addressing the potential risks and challenges associated with AI. Some of the issues ethical AI addresses are detecting lies, eliminating biased responses, preventing discrimination, and preventing users' data.

Key Principles of Ethical AI for Enriched Social Value 

Enterprises should design AI responsibly so that it does not harm humans. Furthermore, it should promote fairness, transparency, and accountability. Here are some of the fundamental principles that determine an ethical AI. 

  • Transparency: From autonomous driving cars to the hiring process and generative content, AI has become an integral part of enterprises and individuals. Businesses and the public using AI need to comprehend how the algorithms work and why AI has made certain decisions. Transparency makes AI more reliable to the government and users as a whole. That is why the UK government is supporting transparent and non-biased AI. Transparent AI models can enhance users' trust and offer room to improve accountability. 
  • Impartiality: AI vendors should design the AI models so there is no discrimination in the AI's results or outcomes. Any biased dataset or training inequality can create chaos. Therefore, enterprises need to treat all humans equally. AI vendors and developers should perform a dataset audit to filter out biases. Again, all data are unfit for training. Some can reduce fairness or increase bias. AI vendors should also eliminate them. 
  • Reliability & accountability: The UK government wants its AI to deliver safe results. AI engineers and vendors design the algorithms run by the AI. Thus, they are accountable when something goes wrong. With accountable AI development, enterprises should also stay vigilant about protecting their accountability. A team should understand how appropriate the AI system is for generating results. They should also supervise the algorithm designs and development and pick high-quality data for suitable results. 
  • Human control and administration: AI's decision-making ability is sensitive. All nations want AI systems to remain under human control and add societal value. While AI systems can learn to make decisions without human intervention, it is an essential trait of an ethical AI to stay under the complete control of humans. Sectors like healthcare, finance, and legal decision-making should remain vigilant while using AI for critical decision-making. 
  • Privacy and security: AI vendors and developers should establish security postures to train AI models for safety. Data security techniques like data encryption at rest and in transit are essential. Again, discovering system vulnerabilities and defending against malicious attacks plays a vital role in securing AI systems. Companies and vendors can also protect data privacy by creating dummy datasets from the original data. It will help AI systems remain unaware of existing user data while learning how to use them.

Benefits of Leveraging Ethical AI Driving Social Values

Ethical AI has become a powerful tool for enterprises that drives social value, transparency, sustainability, and fairness. Businesses that need to automate various tasks can align themselves with ethical AI to reap its maximum benefits. Here are some real-world advantages and applications of ethical AI.

  • Bias-Free Hiring: Humans can be biased because of their emotions. Therefore, various companies have started utilising ethical AI to eliminate biases in hiring. At companies like Unilever, AI tools analyse resumes and portfolios. Then, they conduct written and video interviews based on skills and competencies. Such a clean, bias-free approach promotes diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
  • Financial inclusions: AI-powered systems also deliver micro-loans, insurance situation verification, and market predictions to give credit. Ethical AI can help cater to such services uniformly without discrimination or undue preference. It promotes financial inclusion while assuring transparency and justice in credit scoring. 
  • Criminal justice: Legal authorities and court advocates employ ethical AI to analyse judicial data through AI algorithms. These AI systems help to identify biases in sentencing. Other AI systems help analyse whether criminal records and evidence are genuine or fake. Tools like COMPAS are helping lawyers ensure fairer case results in the criminal justice system. 
  • Combating misinformation: As excessive freedom of online information becomes mainstream, it has become challenging to identify which facts are genuine and which are fake. Democratising website development and content creation has allowed everyone to write and post online. Such freedom enhances the chances of misinformation and disinformation. That is where ethical AI can help combat misinformation and disinformation by flagging fake news and detecting hate speech on different media and forums. Claim Buster, Fabula AI, and Factmata are well-known AI tools and models to combat misinformation.
  • Natural disaster response: AI solutions also help forecast natural disasters and provide early mitigation strategies with warnings. Ethical AI does not differentiate between people of different countries or races, resulting in timely evacuations and resource allocation, saving lives. Google's Flood Forecasting Initiative is a popular example of ethical AI that can predict natural disasters in advance. 
  • Reliable healthcare: Various healthcare firms use ethical AI to develop diagnostic tools that provide factual and inexpensive healthcare details and solutions in rural areas. With ethical AI implementation comes reliability and accountability. AI-powered platforms like Ada Health come with personalised medical guidance and recommendation systems that ensure data privacy and fairness at the same time.

Challenges of Ethical AI While Driving Social Values 

Ethical AI is beneficial to humans and society as a whole. Despite several advantages of ethical AI in driving societal values, companies and the government still face challenges in developing a completely ethical AI.

  • Biased datasets and algorithms: With biased datasets and algorithmic designs, AI systems can unintentionally invite societal discrimination, leading to chaos. To address this challenge, enterprises and the government should take the initiative to train models continuously with diverse data sets.
  • Sensitive data leakage: Since AI models need tremendous user data to keep them up to date for personalised experiences, sensitive user data leakage is possible through malicious AI prompts. Also, storing large-scale user data raises concern among business stakeholders and the government that leverages it. Thus, enterprises should employ a robust security framework to prevent sensitive data leakage.
  • Uncertain regulations, laws, and compliance: AI is a new technology with innovations going on every day. Not every nation is sceptical of the in-depth laws and AI regulations. Again, AI's evolving qualities and regulations pose a compliance challenge. To address this challenge, organisations must stay informed on legal frameworks.

Conclusion 

We hope this article provides a clear understanding of ethical AI and its benefits to society. The article also highlighted the various sectors where ethical AI can bring digital innovations in handling day-to-day operations. Then, we encountered some challenges along with approaches to address them. The UK and  other nations are pouring their research and development skills into building an ethical AI ecosystem so that users and the whole country can step towards a new, innovative digital horizon steering social values.

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