Abstract

Responsible Artificial Intelligence (RAI) is a subset of the ethics associated with the use of artificial intelligence, which will only increase with the recent advent of new regulatory frameworks. However, if many firms have announced the establishment of AI governance rules, there is currently an important gap in understanding whether and why these announcements are being implemented or remain “decoupled” from operations. We assess how large global firms have so far implemented RAI, and the antecedents to RAI implementation across a wide range of RAI initiatives. We find that the operationalization of RAI practices is scattered across firms, with only a fringe of companies extensively industrializing RAI. Social pressure pushes RAI design (”saying”) rather than implementation but the reverse is true for competitive pressure. AI capabilities as a bundle of data quality AI architecture, and talents are strongly associated with RAI design to scaling.