Demystifying AI: The Critical Role of Communicators in Promoting Transparency

By Caterina Valentino

Caterina Valentino outlines how communicators can bridge the gap between AI custodianship and public understanding—promoting transparency, trust and ethical awareness through clear, responsible messaging.

Communicator, Hanna Wren, made it clear. Transparency in artificial intelligence (AI) is of utmost importance to building customer trust. Organizations that disclose their use of AI enhance their customer experience (CX) resulting in strong client and organizational bonds of trust. So, what does this mean for the role of communicators?

What’s Transparency in AI?

Transparency in AI allows stakeholders to understand the reasons behind AI’s decisions. It’s documentation that demonstrates to users how the company’s use of AI is fair, accountable and reliable.

Reliability rests on the customer’s belief that the organization has secured its data ethically and trained its AI in a way that minimizes confirmation bias—the tendency of a person to seek out perspectives that align with their pre-existing values.

However, as Bharath Thots, partner in the digital and analytics practice at Kearney management consulting warns, AI transparency encompasses more than disclosing program code. It includes disclosing the interpretability of the model’s decisions.

Interpretability in AI emphasizes understanding the internal processes behind AI’s choices, such as how inputs relate to outputs. An interpretable system clarifies for the user how AI algorithms use decision trees to generate solutions.

Still not sure of the importance of AI transparency? A 2024 Customer Experience Trends report by customer service software creator Zendesk, found a lack of AI transparency could lead to a 75 per cent increase in customer churn.

In other words, transparency involves explaining to stakeholders the understandable, trustworthiness and accountability of an organization’s AI usage. This involves the company understanding its ethical, legal and societal implications whenever it uses AI.

Communicators in public relations, journalism, corporate communications, or public policy play a critical role in making AI transparent.

AI Transparency and Explainability

AI transparency and AI explainability, while often used interchangeably, are different.

AI explainability is focused on explaining the logic and reasoning behind an AI system’s decisions.

AI transparency requires documenting and sharing the entire AI lifecycle—from data collection and processing to training the model—with clients.

The expanding role of Communicators

Communicators your role is to assist and ensure all communications describing AI systems and their interactions are transparent to customers. This includes:

• providing clear and accessible explanations of AI’s decision-making processes, even to those without technical expertise;
• creating user-friendly interfaces and offering plain language explanations within the AI system and
• documenting potential biases and unintended consequences, ensuring users are aware of the limitations of AI systems.

Accountability and Responsibility

AI accountability ensures systems and organizations are accountable and take responsibility for decisions. When an AI chatbot misleads a customer, the company must respond transparently, correcting errors and adding safeguards like human oversight. Regular audits of AI tools help detect bias, ensure fairness, and build trust, making AI use more ethical, accurate and customer-friendly over time.

Communicators, your role is to ensure there are human and complementary computer-assisted auditing techniques (CCAT) for detecting errors, assigning responsibility and providing redress when AI systems cause harm. Specifically, communicators can:

• be responsible for the oversight of detecting and/or correcting errors, biases, or misinformation caused by using AI
• publicly correct misinformation and take steps to prevent future harm and
• initiate policies and procedures to ensure those responsible for AI systems are held accountable for their actions and outcomes.

Gaining Trust and Understanding

Communicators play a vital role in building public trust in AI systems by communicating the benefits of AI in a clear and accessible way, highlighting its potential to solve problems and improve lives.

Your role as a communicator is also to build an organizational culture of transparency and accountability for AI development and use. This includes addressing concerns about AI’s impact on society, fostering open dialogue and engagement with the public.

Addressing Ethical, Legal and Societal Implications

Communicators, your role is to be aware of the ethical and societal implications of AI use, including potential biases, fairness and privacy concerns. You can also promote the development and adoption of responsible AI practices by advocating for transparency, accountability and fairness in the following ways:

• actively working with employees to mitigate risks and ensure that AI is used responsibly and ethically.
• engaging with diverse stakeholders, conducting bias audits, and implementing bias mitigation techniques
• developing policies and guidelines for using AI responsibly and
• advocating for continuous learning and adaptation, ensuring that AI systems are current with the latest research.

AI Transparency Best Practices

Incorporating AI transparency into the organization’s communications demonstrates accountability, establishes reliability and builds enduring trust with clients. Figure 1.1 provides tips for best practices.

Source: What is AI transparency. A comprehensive guide

Communicators be forewarned. Customer enhancing technologies, such as AI, promise advantages that are rooted in operational efficiency, effectiveness and enhancing brand recognition and not necessarily catering to client needs and wants. The bottom line is that excellent customer service will always be built on mutual trust and simplicity.

*ChatGPT assisted in developing the outline for this article.