Agree 100% that it is important to have people embedded in product teams who have accountability for it.

Ai ethics teams are also useful because they understand and keep track of the metrics and the benchmarks and methods used to evaluate biases, risks and harm. This is a super specialized area of knowledge that the whole company and community can capitalize on. It is also hard to keep it up to date- needs close ties to civic society and academic institutions, etc. . Think of it as if you have to set up a “pipeline”, a supply chain of practices, that start with real world insight and academic research and ends with actionable and implementable methods and code and tools.

In very large orgs, having specialized teams helps scale up company wide processes for incident response, policy work, etc.

You can see some of the the output of this work at Microsoft if you search for Sarah Bird’s presentations.

(cheers from another ML person who also worked w reco)