AI LEGO: Scaffolding Cross-Functional Collaboration in Industrial Responsible AI Practices during Early Design Stages

TL;DR

This paper introduces AI LEGO, a web-based tool designed to improve cross-functional collaboration in early-stage responsible AI design by facilitating knowledge transfer and systematic harm identification among technical and non-technical team members.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel scaffolding approach with AI LEGO, a prototype that enhances early-stage harm identification and knowledge sharing in cross-functional AI teams.

Findings

AI LEGO increased harm identification volume and likelihood.

Participants found AI LEGO's modular structure facilitated collaboration.

The tool made early-stage harm assessment more accessible.

Abstract

Responsible AI (RAI) efforts increasingly emphasize the importance of addressing potential harms early in the AI development lifecycle through social-technical lenses. However, in cross-functional industry teams, this work is often stalled by a persistent knowledge handoff challenge: the difficulty of transferring high-level, early-stage technical design rationales from technical experts to non-technical or user-facing roles for ethical evaluation and harm identification. Through literature review and a co-design study with 8 practitioners, we unpack how this challenge manifests -- technical design choices are rarely handed off in ways that support meaningful engagement by non-technical roles; collaborative workflows lack shared, visual structures to support mutual understanding; and non-technical practitioners are left without scaffolds for systematic harm evaluation. Existing tools like JIRA or Google Docs, while useful for product tracking, are ill-suited for supporting joint harm identification across roles, often requiring significant extra effort to align understanding. To address this, we developed AI LEGO, a web-based prototype that supports cross-functional AI practitioners in effectively facilitating knowledge handoff and identifying harmful design choices in the early design stages. Technical roles use interactive blocks to draft development plans, while non-technical roles engage with those blocks through stage-specific checklists and LLM-driven persona simulations to surface potential harms. In a study with 18 cross-functional practitioners, AI LEGO increased the volume and likelihood of harms identified compared to baseline worksheets. Participants found that its modular structure and persona prompts made harm identification more accessible, fostering clearer and more collaborative RAI practices in early design.