Illustrating the significance of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is turning out to be an indispensable paradigm for businesses and individuals. AI is automating and accelerating a specific set of everyday problems such as classification, regression, clustering, detection, recognition, translation, etc. AI can classify whether an incoming e-mail is spam or real, recognize a person's face in an image, understand a speech and convert it into text, create an appropriate caption for a scene, etc. The scope of AI is fast expanding. Industry verticals are keenly exploring and experimenting with different things. Business processes are being automated and optimized through the smart leverage of all kinds of noteworthy advancements happening in the AI space. Increasingly AI takes the center stage in business operations across the globe. There is a dazzling array of integrated platforms, frameworks, toolsets, libraries, and case studies and hence the adoption of AI algorithms and models is picking dramatically in the recent past. However, there are a few critical challenges to be surmounted before the widespread usage of AI models in mission-critical domains such as healthcare, security, retailing, supply chain, and infrastructure management. That is, business executives and IT experts insist on trustworthy and transparent decision-making by AI models.This chapter is to explain the brewing challenges in the AI field and how they can be surmounted through competent technology solutions. Especially how the fast-emerging explainable AI (XAI) is a set of methods and software libraries that allow human users to comprehend and trust the results created by AI models. XAI is to describe an AI model and how it arrived at a particular decision. XAI is to explain the AI model's implications and potential biases. It helps in understanding model accuracy and fairness. XAI turns out to be a crucial cog for mission-critical enterprises to embark on the AI paradigm with all the clarity and confidence. With the maturity of the XAI concept, the AI adoption happens in a responsible manner across industry verticals.