Responsible Innovation

Google

The Story

Building a foundation for the future. I was one of the first members of Google’s Responsible Innovation team, and the first content expert to join. My task was to build a platform for documenting and telling the stories of the many people working to make Google’s technology safer, more socially beneficial, and more responsible to society.

The Strategy

Champion a worthy vision. Work across disciplines and product areas to make technology ethics an urgent and vital area. Craft cohesive and compelling narratives that earn trust with key audiences within Google and beyond. Establish a voice to clearly communicate the value proposition of Responsible Innovation. Build and grow an astonishing content team.

The Significance

The start of something important. Communication and storytelling have begun to spread the idea of responsible innovation across Google and the tech industry. My work has helped define Google’s voice as a responsible actor in a crowded field. The content strategy, philosophy, and processes I created have made Responsible Innovation nimbler, fairer, and better-equipped to face the challenges ahead.

STORIES THAT MAKE TECH SAFER

Responsible Innovation is Google’s central team devoted to AI ethics. As one of the first members of this team, and the very first dedicated to communications and content strategy, I led global storytelling efforts, as well as internal education and documentation efforts.

Much of this work is confidential and cannot be shared, but I can talk about some of it. I have included links to public-facing work when possible. When not possible, I’ve created mockups to illustrate the idea without sharing proprietary material.

The annual AI Principles Update is Google’s most visible public artifact in the field of technology ethics. It’s written for a global audience of policymakers, academics, and other KOFs, and reflects a voice and tone that is familiar to those groups.

Each Update tells dozens of compressed stories through case studies, design elements, visuals, and text contributed by many individuals. As editor, my job was to ensure that the work was cohesive, comprehensive, and correct, and that the correct parties had reviewed and approved the document.

You can find Google’s most recent AI Principles update here.

In addition to the annual Update, Google also regularly publishes responsible AI case studies that tell product-centric stories. I served as editor-in-chief for these case studies, and oversaw the entire publication process from ideation and writing to approvals and launch.

These case studies are intentionally concise, and are written for the same audience of global KOFs. Each case study is an act of collaboration across teams: engineering, ethics, marketing, communications, legal, and public policy are all required to make a responsible AI case study happen.

You can find Google’s public responsible AI case studies here.

As Responsible Innovation’s scope grew, the need for robust topical documentation became clear. As the team’s content lead, I built a system to concisely capture team knowledge on essential subjects: topic briefs. This system became one of the team’s top priorities.

These briefs, along with a flexible series of content tags, allowed the team to track ethical trends, respond more quickly to requests, share knowledge more easily, and make decisions more fairly and consistently.

I led the workstream of ethicists, program managers, UXers, and writers that produced the topic briefs.