Minimum Viable Ethics: From Institutionalizing Industry AI Governance to Product Impact

TL;DR

This study investigates how industry AI ethics professionals attempt to institutionalize ethics in technology companies and translate these practices into product impact. Through 26 semi-structured interviews, it reveals a state of minimum viable ethics, where practitioners operate with limited formal power yet innovate through agile, context-specific tools and governance work. The findings show that institutionalization yields partial standardization—through defined release procedures, governance frameworks, and reusable tooling—but meaningful product impact remains hampered by authority gaps and conflicting product incentives. The authors discuss parallels with privacy and UX practices, and propose actionable recommendations and policy implications to strengthen organizational AI ethics and accelerate regulatory-aligned, product-relevant outcomes.

Abstract

Across the technology industry, many companies have expressed their commitments to AI ethics and created dedicated roles responsible for translating high-level ethics principles into product. Yet it is unclear how effective this has been in leading to meaningful product changes. Through semi-structured interviews with 26 professionals working on AI ethics in industry, we uncover challenges and strategies of institutionalizing ethics work along with translation into product impact. We ultimately find that AI ethics professionals are highly agile and opportunistic, as they attempt to create standardized and reusable processes and tools in a corporate environment in which they have little traditional power. In negotiations with product teams, they face challenges rooted in their lack of authority and ownership over product, but can push forward ethics work by leveraging narratives of regulatory response and ethics as product quality assurance. However, this strategy leaves us with a minimum viable ethics, a narrowly scoped industry AI ethics that is limited in its capacity to address normative issues separate from compliance or product quality. Potential future regulation may help bridge this gap.