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ACCA Strategic Professional · Strategic Business Leader · Enabling success: disruptive technologies

Marlowe Pharma's board is deciding whether an AI diagnostic-support tool should make final treatment-eligibility decisions for clinical trials. The tool has high accuracy but occasionally gives confident wrong outputs, and the consequences for patients could be severe. Which governance response is most appropriate?

The board should retain meaningful human oversight of final decisions, assign clear accountability, and monitor the model's performance. Because wrong outputs could seriously harm patients, full autonomy is unsafe, a total ban gives up benefits, and accountability cannot be transferred to the vendor by contract.

  1. AAllow full autonomy, since accuracy is higher than that of average clinicians
  2. BRetain meaningful human oversight of final decisions, with defined accountability and monitoring of model performanceCorrect
  3. CBan all AI use, because any error rate is unacceptable
  4. DDelegate responsibility to the AI vendor through the contract, removing board accountability

Explanation

Where errors have severe consequences, the board stays accountable and should keep human-in-the-loop oversight with monitoring, balancing benefit against risk. Full autonomy ignores the impact of rare errors, a total ban forgoes benefits, and accountability cannot be contracted away to a vendor.

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