Co-designing an AI Impact Assessment Report Template with AI Practitioners and AI Compliance Experts

TL;DR

This paper presents a collaboratively designed impact assessment report template for AI systems, grounded in regulations, tested in industry, and useful for compliance and design stages.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic co-design process involving practitioners and experts to create a regulation-grounded impact assessment template for AI.

Findings

The template effectively captures necessary impact assessment information.

Participants see its use in both compliance and design stages.

The template addresses gaps in current impact reporting practices.

Abstract

In the evolving landscape of AI regulation, it is crucial for companies to conduct impact assessments and document their compliance through comprehensive reports. However, current reports lack grounding in regulations and often focus on specific aspects like privacy in relation to AI systems, without addressing the real-world uses of these systems. Moreover, there is no systematic effort to design and evaluate these reports with both AI practitioners and AI compliance experts. To address this gap, we conducted an iterative co-design process with 14 AI practitioners and 6 AI compliance experts and proposed a template for impact assessment reports grounded in the EU AI Act, NIST's AI Risk Management Framework, and ISO 42001 AI Management System. We evaluated the template by producing an impact assessment report for an AI-based meeting companion at a major tech company. A user study with 8 AI practitioners from the same company and 5 AI compliance experts from industry and academia revealed that our template effectively provides necessary information for impact assessments and documents the broad impacts of AI systems. Participants envisioned using the template not only at the pre-deployment stage for compliance but also as a tool to guide the design stage of AI uses.