4 Insights from HRTech Company Arena’s Creation of an Ethics Advisory Board

Arena’s AI Ethics Advisory Board

Arena Analytics helps its enterprise customers identify candidates who are most likely to thrive in specific roles, departments, and locations, using big data and predictive analytics. 

Arena’s product team quickly realized that it had blind spots around the unintended effects of the company’s technology. The team requested that a consultant be brought in to help. CEO Myra Norton felt that one consultant’s additional perspective wasn’t enough: they needed multiple additional viewpoints. 

“You have to respect the complexity of the problem. There are no one-line answers to inequality.” 

So Arena created an ethics advisory board. Here are 4 insights from that effort:

1. Bring in the voices of those who have been affected by AI

Myra knew the board needed representation of a range of experiences with the problems the company is trying to address:

 “We need academics who study AI ethics, as well as the people who have been impacted by AI, who have experienced this bias. [...] To do this right, we need all of these perspectives. It will be hard [...] But those conversations-- figuring out how to get people with these different levels of expertise to communicate-- is where the magic happens.”

With the help of John Sumser, a longtime HR tech analyst, Arena brought together a group of people with deep lived experience with being the object of discrimination. 

“The point of ethics in AI is to find ways that it doesn't harm people: the people who are touched by it, [as well as] the people who use it. It’s not that different from making sure that power tools have safety mechanisms built in. We’re just early in the process for ethics in AI.” - John Sumser, Chair of the Arena AI Ethics Advisory Board

2. It’s an advisory board, not a governance function

“The moment you turn ethics into a governance function, you create ethical problems. We do not want to issue edicts; we want to be engaged in a conversation with the company in a dynamic way that allows important ethical issues to be surfaced and be addressed.” - John Sumser, Chair of the Arena AI Ethics Advisory Board

The advisory board was launched in January 2021, and recently held its third meeting. Their thinking evolves every time they meet. Different parts of the company engage with the advisory board depending on the topic for discussion, and the company and advisory board are co-designing the accountability and reporting cadence and mechanisms that work for them. 

“There is no blueprint,” said Myra. Arena realized that it couldn’t depend on others to draft this blueprint, especially for an area so core to the company’s product and business. The company knows that it’s a pioneer, and accepts the potential missteps that come with forging a path where there is none. 

3. It builds organizational courage

“It requires courage to stand something like this up. It also builds courage.”  - CEO Myra Norton

When Arena was recruiting members of the advisory board, Myra was warned to be careful, lest she unintentionally expose the company to unwelcome scrutiny. She wondered “What are we really afraid of? [...] If we are afraid of hard questions, we have bigger problems [than we thought we did.] We are trying to rewire the labor market around outcomes rather than pedigree and perception. Hard questions are our currency.” 

Myra noted that the creation of the board has had a notable knock-on effect within the company. Employees have learned that a proposal they put forth does not fall apart simply because someone else points out a weakness in it; rather, it creates an opportunity to innovate in a different direction.

4. “Inside the company, everyone is excited about this.” 

Interaction with the advisory board has been galvanizing for Arena’s employees. The company’s mission is to have broad societal impact, and it is concerned with avoiding harm. 

Some startups run on the sheer will and ego of the founder. John Sumser noted that this advisory board is a sign of a team seeking to build an institution over time. Company leadership is focused on strengthening the organization’s foundations. 

“The ethics board is an expression of the fundamental management philosophy of the company: ‘We want to see the hard question before anyone else does.’ This is especially important in an organization that builds AI, where there is a lot of smoke blowing around unexpected consequences. Most often, they were foreseeable, but no one bothered to foresee them.” - John Sumser, Chair of the AI Ethics Advisory Board

With its AI ethics advisory board, Arena Analytics has taken a meaningful step towards foreseeing those unexpected consequences.