World's Fair 2025
Critical AI Inference your CIO can Trust — Sahil Yadav, Hariharan Ganesan, Telemetrak
Sahil Yadav , Hariharan Ganesan , Telemetrak
Overview
This talk addresses the critical need for trustworthy AI, especially in mission-critical applications where AI inferences directly impact business decisions and financial outcomes. It highlights a significant gap between AI adoption and AI governance, leading to potential silent failures with substantial financial and operational consequences. The presentation introduces a framework for building and scaling AI systems that instill confidence through explainability, traceability, and robust guardrails.
Who should watch
- AI Engineers
- Product Managers
- Builders of AI systems
- Anyone concerned with AI governance and risk management
- Teams facing challenges with AI reliability and unexpected behavior
Key takeaways
- A large percentage of companies adopting AI lack focus on AI governance, creating a significant risk gap.
- Failures in AI systems can manifest as silent, unquantifiable issues leading to millions in losses, such as telecom disruptions or misinterpretations of sensor data.
- Trustworthy AI is built on three pillars: explanability (understanding the AI's reasoning), traceability (like a flight recorder for AI actions), and guardrails (thresholds to prevent critical failures).
- The concept of XTOPS (eXperience Trust Operations) is introduced as an evolution of MLOps, integrating conscience and human oversight throughout the AI lifecycle, from data verification to model deployment and feedback.
- XTOPS emphasizes verifiable traceability, embedding actionable intelligibility into models, deploying adaptive controls, and fostering human-AI teaming for continuous improvement.
- Key metrics for managing AI trust include Mean Time To Resolve Explainable errors (MTRE) and Trust Adjusted Risk in dollars, which quantify the cost of AI failures and reputational damage.
- A case study demonstrated how implementing an XTOPS-like framework helped resolve a critical GPS drift issue in a worker safety AI platform, reducing false positives and increasing user trust in alerts.
- Convincing CIOs of the value of trustworthy AI requires framing it in terms of cost savings and risk reduction, with potential savings of millions per site annually.
Notable quotes
*These are silent failures. You cannot quantify the impact of these failures ahead of time but they are worth millions and billions of dollars over time.*
*XTOPS is not about creating a is about creating a system where every AI decision has a clear why, a when and a who and attached to it.*
*The answer is. You got to convince the CIOS that this is saving money.*
Unofficial community note. Prefer the recording for nuance.