AI Guardrails: What They Are and Why They Matter

It’s easy to get excited about GenAI’s potential to transform businesses – for good reason. AI has proven its ability to accurately assemble facts, summarize documents, and generate intelligent insights. Companies are already relying on GenAI to interact with customers and employees, expedite training and onboarding, generate unique images, and create compelling marketing copy. Scaled up to an entire organization, this translates to accelerated workflows, improved performance, and cost-saving automation. 

But to succeed in production, AI applications need to do more than simply leverage the technology’s potential – and address its limitations. We all know that large language models, or LLMs, occasionally hallucinate and make up facts. But their subtler flaws can be just as damaging. Customer-facing conversational AI that strays off-message can harm a company’s reputation. When automated workflows enabled by GenAI behave unethically or share confidential information, they can cause legal trouble.   

As AI applications gain prominence in back-of-shop and, increasingly, front-of-shop operations, the accuracy, reliability, and trustworthiness of their output are becoming more critical than ever to manage their inherent risks. Focus on AI risk management will only intensify as AI applications become more autonomous and integrated into business operations. It’s also why AI governance frameworks, and AI Guardrails in particular, will become indispensable tools for the development of safe, reliable, and responsible AI applications. 

For a quick overview of AI Guardrails and why they matter for businesses, check out the video below by Simone Abbiati, Head of Training and Education at Squirro! 

What are AI Guardrails? 

AI Guardrails are tailored frameworks that ensure the safe, responsible, and compliant use of AI systems. While AI Guardrails have predominantly been used to prevent GenAI from generating sexist, racist, or otherwise offensive outputs, their true scope in corporate settings goes much further. 

Governance Guardrails reduce risk by ensuring that AI systems comply with corporate policies, ethical norms, and legal mandates.

Role Guardrails ensure that AI systems personalize their actions according to individual user personas, considering their individual user requirements, rights, and persona. 

Performance Guardrails ensure that AI-driven processes and workflows are carried out according to best practices to boost process efficiency and quality. 

Brandkey Guardrails keep AI-generated content on-brand in terms of corporate tone and voice, mission, vision, and values.

Why Do AI Guardrails Matter? 

Reducing Compliance Risks

In some legislations, such as in the US, AI systems are prohibited from providing financial advice. As a result, financial institutions that rely on GenAI in their front-of-shop operations need to take measures to ensure that customers are not able to trick their conversational AIs into providing investment guidance – or else face repercussions from financial regulators. These types of risks can be mitigated by setting up AI Guardrails to verify the internal compliance of AI-generated responses before they are passed on to internal or external users.

Ensuring Persona-Based Roles

As GenAI enables increasingly autonomized processes and workflows, in particular in customer-service applications, AI systems need a heightened understanding of the rights and personas of the people they are interacting with. Just a couple years ago, someone shopping for a car online famously tricked a car dealer’s conversational AI to lower a car’s price tag to just one dollar, which it did. AI Guardrails can help prevent such slip ups by ensuring that AI systems are aware of their users’ roles depending on their persona.  

One Brand, One Voice

In the best case, a company’s brand should shine boldly through the sum total of its activities. As a growing share of customer and employee interactions are mediated with GenAI, organizations will be forced to take measures to ensure that the tone of voice, the typography, messaging, and design of any AI generated content are compliant with their corporate identity. AI Guardrails make it easy to address this challenge, guaranteeing that every customer request is answered to the point and on-brand.  

Context-Rich Prompts for Sharper Answers

Through our recent investment in meetsynthia.ai, a pioneer in the development of AI Guardrail Management Systems, we can offer our customers the tools they need to build and maintain AI Guardrails tailored to their unique use case and requirements. In this rapidly evolving space, having a stake in meetsynthia.ai will help us shape the future of AI Guardrails and Guardrail Management Systems, helping customers mitigate risks, reduce operational and legal liabilities and safeguard against AI hallucinations.

Read more about our commitment to shaping the future of AI Guardrails through our investment in meetsynthia.ai in our latest press release: Squirro Invests in meetsynthia.ai to Shape Development of AI Guardrails. 

And if you’d like to learn more about how AI Guardrails can enhance your business, book a free demo of our Enterprise GenAI Platform!