The Peter P. Dhillon Centre for Business Ethics ushers in ten-year anniversary with Summit on the Promise and Peril of AI

The Peter P. Dhillon Centre for Business Ethics at the UBC Sauder School of Business recently commemorated its ten-year anniversary. Over the past decade, the Centre has inspired scholars and business leaders to contribute towards a society built on values of social good, sustainability and ethics.

It has also strived to deliver on a key pillar: to engage with policy makers and industry professionals to cultivate dialogue and debate on topics that shape the future of business. It's no coincidence, then, that the Dhillon Centre celebrated the milestone with a summit dedicated to the ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Titled The Promise and Peril of AI, the summit—held at the Fairmont Hotel in Vancouver—brought together business leaders, government representatives, and academics to discuss the subject.
 

“The summit is meant to be thought-provoking and really stir conversation around some of the hard, topical questions facing business and society,” said Dhillon Centre Academic Director and event organizer Dr. Kirstin Appelt. “The event was a home-run for us. We were thrilled to have such a full room of folks coming together from different backgrounds to fervently engage in a discussion about the nuances of AI. When it comes to ethical, socially responsible business, it’s hard to overstate the importance of asking the tough questions. Events like these are critical for bringing together leaders in business, government, and academia to engage in these challenging conversations.”
 

Leveraging diverse backgrounds to train AI models

Amongst the Spotlight Speakers was Dr. Rogayeh Tabrizi, author of Behavioral AI and Founder and CEO of Theory+Practice - a technology company that builds machine learning and AI platforms to help retail firms make efficient decisions.

In her talk, Tabrizi reflected on her experiences helping industry leaders navigate their trepidation towards adding AI to their decision toolkit. Her talk underscored that AI adoption is a human journey as much as it is a technological one.
 

Speaking to the Dhillon Centre on the sidelines of the event, she explained that future business leaders and their diverse, multidisciplinary backgrounds will play an important role in training AI models.

"When you bring together people from different backgrounds—business, academia, psychology, behavioural science, even physics and computer science—you get a mix of perspectives and skills," said Tabrizi.

"With this collaboration, odds are you're more likely to build AI systems that are balanced, and that you'll spot the kinds of data signals [audio, images, videos etc.] that will be important and useful for us, and not just the obvious ones."

Tabrizi believes when we're able to navigate some of the complexities of training AI models, the benefits—especially achieving efficiencies—are remarkable. 

She shared the example of helping a major supply chain company save tens of millions of dollars simply by using AI models to forecast their product demand and delivery based on past patterns.  "You can experiment with everything from drug discovery to optimizing delivery routes, like making sure trucks aren’t going out half full or creating unnecessary emissions. When you use [AI models] effectively, you’re not just making things more efficient … you’re unlocking a huge amount of work we couldn’t even access before."
 

The need for guardrails around AI

On the flipside of AI's power lurks its peril. 

Howe Gu is the Microsoft's Managing Director for Industry and Partner Sales in Europe, Middle East and Africa. He’s also an alumnus of UBC Sauder’s MBA Program, specializing in Strategic Management and Sustainability.

During the day, he leads his team at Microsoft to unlock innovative AI and cloud solutions to address the industry's most pressing challenges. Speaking to the Dhillon Centre after his talk, Gu reflected on the big ethical question around AI that keeps him up at night: "As we move from generative AI to more agentic AI, it's starting to take on more decision-making—like ordering an Uber, buying groceries, or planning vacations. It's taking over tasks humans used to do, which raises the question: where do we draw the line? What decisions still need a human in the loop, and which ones can AI handle on its own? The agency of AI is growing and we need to keep setting clear guardrails around it."
 

Gu said responsible leadership will be at the forefront of setting and protecting those guardrails. He stressed that AI has to be grounded in principles of accountability, trust, transparency, and fairness. He also advocated for AI to be 'secure by design' and 'secure in operations', which means any new technology should launch with the most secure and private settings as default.

"Doing that takes change management, education, and training," said Gu. "As leaders, we have to ask: is this technology designed to be safe? Once set up, are we using it in a safe way? And are we training people to use it responsibly? That whole process has to be ongoing, and it takes effort from the C-suite all the way to the board."
 

Future generation pushing AI towards 'big, bold solutions'

Gu said summits spearheaded by the Dhillon Centre are an opportunity to have a frank discussion about AI and, collectively, identify some of the blind spots that we're likely to miss when we're immersed in using the technology on our own.

"One of the valuable takeaways from an event like this is to demonstrate the ability to really open our minds, be educated and collaboratively think about what we can do to make this type of new, exciting technology safer for its users," said Gu.

Reflecting on the role of UBC Sauder students—many of whom were present at the summit—Gu said the path towards the future of AI is laden with hope.

"It’s exciting to see how young people, especially Gen Z and Gen Alpha, have embraced AI in their daily lives—as advisors, guides, and tools for creativity. That enthusiasm is driving innovation," said Gu.

"We need to watch for over-reliance, whether emotional or in decision-making. But that said, what's super encouraging is that students are pushing us to think critically about AI. It’s that mindset of embracing technology and aiming for big, bold solutions that's pushing us to tackle challenges we might’ve once thought were impossible."

“As we look toward the next ten years, the questions are only going to get tougher when it comes to ethical, socially responsible business,” said Kirstin Appelt. “At the Centre, we hope to continue to play a role in surfacing the hard questions, bringing together business, government, and academic leaders to debate the answers, and training our students, the business leaders of tomorrow, to seek (rather than avoid) these challenging conversations.”