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Previous: The Role of Stakeholder Engagement in AI

Table of Contents

Next: Incentives & Risks of Stakeholder Engagement

Stakeholder Map Overview

• This overview of the actors (individual, organizational, and institutional) is specific to corporate-led stakeholder engagement
  • The role, resources, decision-making capacity, incentives, and risks for the same category of actor (e.g., technology company) may be different under different circumstances (e.g., the company is a stakeholder for a government-led stakeholder engagement process)
• Stakeholder communities (or any other collection of actors) are not monoliths
  • While individuals may have shared circumstances and interests, groups will encompass a diversity of experiences and opinions
  • Communities may have conflicting needs and individuals within an impacted community may be impacted differently and to varying degrees of severity due to other intersecting factors (e.g., race and gender)
• Corporate actors are also not monoliths
  • Individuals or team may have values and objectives driving their work with stakeholder communities that are different from those of another team within the same organization or the organization/company itself
  • While it eases friction for there to be clear alignment among team members attempting stakeholder engagement work, other teams (e.g., legal or product development) and the overall organization, it is not a necessary condition for an individual or team to lead stakeholder engagement work on behalf of a company

Stakeholder Engagement Actors

Sponsors

Refers to the individual, team(s), or organization that is seeking input on their product, service, or system through stakeholder engagement or has the organizational authority to request staff conduct stakeholder engagement. Sponsors are subdivided into clusters defined by their general role within an AI-developing, corporate, organization below for further discussion.

• Different sponsors tend to be involved in different (and possibly multiple) aspects of stakeholder engagement, such as requesting, designing, implementing, and/or providing the necessary financial resources to conduct the stakeholder engagement
• Different sponsors tend to play different roles and have different levels of authority and decision making power within a stakeholder engagement. As the sponsor of the engagement, they have the authority to start or end an engagement at any time and retain control of the data or insights collected through the stakeholder engagement process to use as they see fit
• For the purposes of this resource, we are focusing specifically on corporate-led stakeholder engagement, or individuals and teams that work in commercial, for-profit organizations that develop AI products, services, and/or systems

Participants

Refers to the individuals outside of the immediate development team or organization whose input is being sought as part of stakeholder engagement. Participants are organized by their proximity to the sponsoring entity (has direct contact with the teams or individuals implementing stakeholder engagement to no direct existing relationship) and the extent to which it is formally organized into a coherent group or collective entity.

• As a participant in the engagement, they have the ability to choose if and when they participate, but may not have the ability to determine whether or how the stakeholder engagement takes place; they may also have little to no control over how the information collected is interpreted, applied, or used by the engagement sponsor
• For the purposes of this resource, we are focusing specifically on the insights, experiences, and needs of socially marginalized communities, or the people whose experiences do not align with that of the “majority” or “average” user or market audience because of structured forms of inequality (including those organized around social identities like race or gender) such as having a physical or developmental disability, identifying as LGBTQI+

Other Stakeholders