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Stakeholder Engagement in the Context of AI

• Companies engage in stakeholder engagement as part of UX research and design, product ideation and development, risk management protocols, impact assessment, corporate responsibility, Responsible AI compliance, or marketing strategy.
• Incentives for conducting stakeholder engagement include:
  • Avoiding reputational risk
  • Improving product development
  • Harm mitigation
  • Promote broader adoption of AI products and new technologies
  • Relationship-building with stakeholder communities
  • General public relations

How Stakeholder Engagement is Conducted

• Stakeholder engagement can be internal and private to the company or it might be more public-facing. It can be designed and implemented by:
  • Internal teams: User Experience (UX) researchers and designers, AI developers and engineers, corporate responsibility teams, Responsible AI teams, policy teams
  • External groups: consultants, nonprofit orgs, academic researchers, regulators/auditors
• Stakeholder engagement activities can include:
  • Focus groups or group meetings (facilitated discussions where individuals are asked to talk about something as a group)
  • Participatory workshops (a series of facilitated discussion and activity sessions for a designated group)
  • Qualitative interviews (individual interviews where participants are asked a similar battery of questions)
  • User testing (participants are invited to use the product/service and give direct feedback about their experience)
  • Diary studies (participants are invited to use the product/service over an extended period of time and maintain a regular diary where they note their observations)
  • Surveys and questionnaires (distributing structured or semi-structured surveys to gather quantitative and qualitative data on stakeholder opinions, preferences, and experiences)
  • Community advisory boards (establishing a one-time or ongoing advisory groups composed of community representatives who meet regularly to provide input on specific products)
  • Public consultations (structured processes where stakeholders are invited to review and comment on proposed policies, plans, or products before final decisions are made)
  • “Hack-a-thons” or innovation or red teaming exercises (intensive, time-bound events where diverse teams of stakeholders collaborate to develop innovative solutions to specific challenges related to a product or service)
  • Listening tours (conducting visits to various stakeholder communities to listen to their concerns, needs, and perspectives in their own environments)
• Stakeholder engagement activities can span:
  • One-time engagement
  • Several engagements over time with different groups or individuals
  • Several engagements over time with the same group or set of individuals
  • Prolonged relationship building with a community that results in co-design

User Testing or Stakeholder Engagement?

Some may argue some forms of user testing is distinct from more comprehensive stakeholder engagement, where the emphasis is about ensuring that the needs of communities are considered and potential harms are mitigated, but it has become conflated within the AI/digital tech space. Traditionally, user testing is often more focused on questions of product functionalities or features, but might miss some of the downstream social impacts or unintended use cases associated with a product. For example, users providing feedback about a chatbot persona they prefer might be part of user testing, whereas true stakeholder engagement would consider what negative impacts might result from users’ dependency on a particular chatbot persona for wellness advice. Comprehensive user testing, that allows for greater feedback not just about the usability of a feature, can be aligned with inclusive stakeholder engagement approaches. Different methods and types of engagement achieve different goals (e.g., informing communities about different technologies, empowering them to decide what should or should not be developed). This does not necessarily imply a hierarchy of engagement goals or approaches: it is about being more intentional about identifying the purpose and goals of engagement and then identifying the right approach and method to achieve that.

Common Applications of Stakeholder Engagement during the AI Development Lifecycle

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