Yonatan Zunger, CVP and Deputy CISO for Microsoft, has spent his career considering complex questions with security and privacy while building platform infrastructure and solutions. His experience underpins his advice on how to build a safety plan for working with AI. First and foremost, his advice is to have a written plan.
“Make it an expectation in your organization that people will create safety plans and have them for everything,” Zunger says. “People get so excited about having clarity in front of them that they end up making much more systematic, careful plans, and the rate of errors goes down dramatically.”
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Read our practical advice about applying security fundamentals to AI.
Key takeaways
Here are questions and ideas to consider as you create a safety plan for your AI systems:
- Define the problem. What problem are you trying to solve? A simple and clear problem statement is always a great starting point before building anything, including an AI agent.
- Outline the solution. What is the basis of your solution? Can you explain your solution to an end user? What does a developer or administrative user of your solution need to know about what it is and does?
- List the things that can go wrong. What can go wrong with your solution? Creating this list is the first step to figuring out how to deal with those issues.
- Document your plan. What is your plan to address identified concerns? Identify the process you will follow when something goes wrong.
- Draft your plan early and update it as your solution matures. Your safety plan can be as simple as a list or outline and should evolve as you prepare to build your solution.
- Get feedback and buy-in. When you review the plan with stakeholders and leaders in your team and organization, you may uncover risks or issues you had not thought of. You also build awareness and agreement on what to do when something goes wrong.
- Make a template and build its use into your processes. This tip is for anyone who leads a team or influences process development. Encourage using a safety template in all your projects to bring clarity and structure to how you work with AI.
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