8 am Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) in California. The day was just starting for Gunjan Sinha, Chairman of Metric Stream, which is a market leader in Governance, Risk and Compliance, as he sat for his video interview with Indiaai.

With degrees in engineering from IIT, UC Santa Cruz and Stanford University, Sinha is one of the earliest Internet pioneers in the USA – he is the founder of WhoWhere, an internet search engine – which was at the time the fourth most popular site after AOL, Yahoo and MSN. After selling WhoWhere to Lycos in 1998, Sinha went on to start customer engagement software company eGain Corporation, took the company public on NASDAQ and served as its president until 2003, when he joined MetricStream.

As executive chairman, Sinha’s main job is to develop and lead the firm’s overall strategy and execution. He has witnessed sea changes in the field of Governance, Compliance and Risk (GRC) in the past 17 years – and believes that it has shifted from a reactive to a proactive need. Especially after the 2008 subprime crisis that led to the fall of Lehmann Brothers, the market sentiment towards organizational GRC grew more serious, structured and with the aim of making GRC a core leadership strategy.

Today, MetricStream powers enterprises around the world including Fortune 500 companies, Global 2000 companies, international organisations and government agencies – with the bedrock of trust, integrity and sound governance. Some of MetricStream’s customers include Standard Chartered Bank, Societe Generale, SunPower Corporation, Western Digital Corporation, Doha Bank, Bapco, Mastercard, Sandisk, Philips, Mondelez International among others.

With the advent and rapid rise of AI in business, Sinha believes the organization of the future will be built on five pillars – sense of purpose, diversity and inclusion, empowerment of the first line, ethical data and socially conscious AI. “McKinsey’s data states that nearly 30% of the world economies will be run by AI. Imagine a bank being run only by bots – would you be comfortable as a customer if these bots ran unchecked and ungoverned? The future of work will be hugely led by AI, with humans at the core. A futuristic organization also needs compliance and governance,” says Sinha.

MetricStream is currently building a suite of products and solutions that bring intelligence to their existing GRC platforms, powered by a dynamic application of machine learning algorithms to provide recommendations, anticipate threats and intuitively lead organisations to smarter decisions. “The sheer volume of customer transactions today for any single client we have cannot be addressed successfully without the intervention of the latest technology tools. Business decisions today span continents, jurisdictions, customer preferences – all in a matter of minutes and even seconds. Our business models have to be as agile, as compliance can never take a fall,” explains Sinha.

AI4GRC: Thinking Ahead of Challenges

AI4GRC is now the collective goal of the company, which is championing the use and deployment of responsible AI across its customer suite. “The transformative benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) cannot be fully realized until the ethical and societal risks of AI are also brought into the equation and are appropriately addressed. That’s where “sustainable AI” comes in,” says Sinha. In December 2019, Metric Stream entered into a partnership with the AI Sustainability Center, a global leader in sustainable and ethical AI. In a press note, Metric Stream stated that the two parties will collaborate with MetricStream’s M7 cloud-based GRC platform to automate and standardize the AI Sustainability Center’s risk scanning method and risk profiling for data-driven solutions. This first of its kind, innovative approach will allow organizations across industries to systematically and quickly gain insights into their use of artificial intelligence (AI) and data-driven solutions and how these technologies are scaling in their processes, products, and more broadly in society.

Instead of allowing companies to fail fast, this tool will be a preventive step to control negative consequences arising from the misuse or overuse of technologies, which are sometimes very hard to fix and recover from. Sinha adds, “Companies must start getting into this mode of thinking a few steps into the future, and work towards getting ahead of crises.”

Social Impact Initiatives on AI4Billions:

Besides making the world less risky, more compliant, and a whole lot better governed - Sinha is an avid believer in “Do Good and Do Well” – the duality of profit and purpose. Sinha’s family has also supported OpenGrowth.com, a venture incubation and social impact community that’s helping entrepreneurial teams build lasting companies. Among its many social impact projects include mPrivacy.org, CFHI.org and AIsquare.org. mPrivacy.org aims at bringing together leading telecom and mobile operators to build ethical data exchange standards. CFHI.org is aimed at developing transformative healthcare education to under-served global communities while AIsquare.org rallies some of the world’s most prolific minds to solve challenges emerging out of the COVID19 pandemic. “AI is no longer the privilege of a select few, but for the billions who need it the most. AI can lead to incremental improvements in food supply, agriculture patterns, clinical research and drug development, healthcare delivery.. the list is endless. These social impact initiatives are looking to build a new future on AI and its immense potential.”

“AI Beckons New Leadership Standards”

As AI continues to transform businesses, Sinha believes this growth has to take place concurrently with ethical implications, and this needs to be perpetuated by a new crop of business leaders who have to think of “the bigger picture”. “There is a need for compliance at every stage in our lives. Leaders of the future will be those who can drive revenue, and do so within ethical and responsible guard rails. While not every leader needs to be a data scientist or an engineer, he should however have to understand and leverage the power of technology to transform businesses. That will be a key differentiator.”