Exygy’s Post

🤔 "What does it look like to practice responsible product development with GenAI in affordable housing?" Last week, Exygy had the chance to invite a group of affordable housing professionals and technical experts to a design sprint to discover if there were potential opportunities to leverage GenAI to solve known issues in the space of affordable housing. Let me lead with the fact that we knew there would be a healthy amount of skepticism, myself included, about whether we could identify appropriate use cases to leverage the technology. → We recognize we are serving traditionally marginalized communities who are more vulnerable to systemic inequities. → We understand that within these communities there is a certain mistrust of government services and new technology. → We respect that we are dealing with a history of scarce, dispersed, and biased data sets. 🙌 Given all of that, I was proud of what we were able to accomplish in the limited time we had. → We invited a diverse group of stakeholders representing housing counselors, leasing agents, and city staff with lived experience to speak about what the greatest needs are. → We got to hear from technical experts with experience working in the public sector to explain the promise, risks, and limitations of the technology including Michael Hany Elabd and Neil S. from U.S. Digital Response → Exygy was also able to present our method for how we propose to ensure ethical principles can be maintained with the use of responsible guardrails throughout the product development process. 💎 At a high level, some of what our team presented to ensure a principle-led process included: → Start with framing use cases: We need to weigh the need for AI against its risks and sustainability while identifying those who will be impacted. → Staff ethical champions: We need someone who is tasked, from the outset, with measuring any potential negative impacts as we go. → Invest in community partnership: We need to create a feedback loop with our community partners ensuring we are co-designing and continuing to listen to those who are directly affected. 👏 I’ll be posting a series of takeaways for folks who want to learn more about what we discussed and possibly apply some of what we came up with. Big shoutout to our partners at Google.org and Metropolitan Transportation Commission BAHFA for making it all happen. Thanks to Barry Roeder Gabriel Doss Adam Mansour Melissa Tang(she/her) Morgan Russell (She, Her) Hannah Holloway Ky-Nam Miller Antonella Guidoccio Sean Albert Nick Noreña Caroline Vance Bruister and so many more for making it all happen. #affordablehousing #ai #design #productdevelopment