Biases related to factors such as age, ethnicity, gender, and income can unintentionally creep into your next-best-action decision strategies, and skew the outcomes. The result? Harmful or discriminatory practices such as fewer loans, insurance policies, or product discounts being offered to underserved populations – not to mention the consequences to your business of distorted results, regulatory violations, and the loss of public trust.

With Pega’s Ethical Bias Check, you can now act more ethically during every customer interaction. You start by defining fields with 'bias potential', then by simulating the strategies. This simulation ensures that your strategies are not skewed unfairly towards or away from specific groups.

Pega’s Ethical Bias Check sends alerts with detailed reporting when a bias risk reaches unacceptable levels. With the alerts, you can pinpoint the offending algorithm or business rule and adjust it accordingly, to ensure a more balanced and ethical outcome for everyone.

The process for configuring and running ethical bias checks consists of four simple steps:

• Define the fields to monitor for bias
• Simulate and automatically test strategies
• Generate warnings when biases are found
• Identify those strategies (including logic, models, rules, etc.) to validate to resolve the issue

The following figure shows how to set your bias thresholds:

Defining ethical bias thresholds

For more information, see "Configuring ethical bias checks" in the "Strategies" chapter of the Pega Marketing User Guide on the Pega Marketing product page.