CognitiveScale Announces Cortex Certifai to Tackle Trust as a Barrier to Enterprise AI Adoption

By STS News Desk On Sep 19, 2019

CognitiveScale's Cortex Certifai Software Offers Trusted AI Applications via the Google Cloud Marketplace

New Product Provides Enterprise Customers with the Industry’s First AI Vulnerability Detection and Risk Management Capability on Any Cloud

CognitiveScale, the leader in practical, scalable and trusted AI software, announced the industry’s first AI vulnerability detection and risk management product to address growing customer needs for managing AI transparency and business risks.

The new product, Cortex Certifai, uses AI to automatically detect and score vulnerabilities in almost all black box models without requiring access to model internals. Cortex Certifai helps enterprises detect and manage risk in automated decisions systems by answering pressing questions, such as: How did the AI system predict what it predicted? If a person got an unfavorable outcome from the models, what can they do to change that? Has the model been unfair to a particular group? How easily can the model be fooled?

Cortex Certifai is available both as a stand-alone application and as a container-based Kubernetes application on all major cloud providers and behind the firewall. CognitiveScale will be demonstrating this product at the AI and Data Science in Trading conference on Monday, Sept. 16^th in London.

New game, new rules:

Artificial intelligence is here to stay. It’s being rapidly adopted in virtually every domain and is now seen as a source of competitive advantage by executives. According to a report by McKinsey Global Institute, early adopters of AI are projected to share in a global profit pool valued at $1 trillion by 2030.

However, to trust and adopt an AI system, we must have confidence in its decisions. Most automated decisioning models machine learning algorithms, statistical models and business rules — often function in oblique, invisible ways as black-boxes. This has resulted in significant concern about business risk and is slowing down AI adoption in the enterprise. According to a recent survey by Dimensional Research, nearly eight out of 10 enterprise organizations currently engaged in AI and ML report that projects have stalled due to issues of data quality and model confidence.

Underscoring the need for Trusted AI systems, Dave Schubmehl, Research Director, Cognitive/Artificial Intelligence Systems, IDC, said, “Societal trust is critical for widespread adoption of artificial intelligence, deep learning and machine learning on a worldwide basis. The need for explainability and detection of potential bias in predictive and prescriptive AI models will be a critical requirement as organizations, governments and consumers demand more accountability from AI-based decisions.”

Built for the customers, with the customers:

“Jackson’s vision is to transform customer and advisor engagement with technology through a combination of APIs, platforms and ecosystems. We are excited to be working with CognitiveScale to ensure our AI systems have the right governance and controls around explainability, bias and robustness,” said Dev Ganguly, CIO, Jackson National.

CognitiveScale has been developing Cortex Certifai in the field for over two years first with the Canadian Government and more recently with leading banks, insurance companies and healthcare companies. It was designed to help meet growing customer need for visibility and control of automated decisioning systems and involved pioneering work around a unique AI risk metric called the AI Trust Index. The AI Trust Index has been developed by AI Global in collaboration with CognitiveScale, academia, industry groups and business. It is the first-ever FICO-like composite risk score for any black-box decision making model based on five dimensions – fairness, explainability, robustness, data rights and compliance.

“Cortex Certifai expands our mission to deliver practical, scalable and trusted AI software to our customers and we are delighted to see the enthusiastic response to our new product by both customers and analysts,” said Matt Sanchez, founder and CTO of CognitiveScale. “Much as Security as a Service accelerated the adoption of internet workloads, Trust as a Service in the cloud will rapidly accelerate adoption and impact of AI to drive radically new value to customers and build basis for competitive advantage for decades to come.”