February 03, 2025
Technological advances are having a profound impact on ethical practices in organizations, making the work of experts in the field more complex than ever. For Joé T. Martineau, an associate professor in HEC Montréal’s Department of Management and an instructor at Executive Education HEC Montréal, this is one of the major challenges to overcome in 2025.
How do you guarantee data privacy for an organization and its clients? What role will people play in monitoring technologies like artificial intelligence (AI)? How far can you push the automation of tasks? What does tomorrow’s working world look like and how can we protect jobs? These are just some of the questions that organizations are raising with the advent of new technology — with AI at the front of the line. “Innovations like these are disrupting the working world and are far from risk-free,” Martineau says. “They have to be developed and implemented thoughtfully to avoid pitfalls that affect not only organizations, but also society as a whole.”
That’s why it’s important not to ignore the ethical considerations surrounding these technologies. “AI can be involved in a range of processes, whether assisting with or automating tasks,” she says. “This is the case in health care: robots using artificial intelligence are already assisting surgeons with certain procedures.”
But Martineau points out that many non-generative functions can also create ethical conflicts. This is the case when technologies can be put to dual use. “AI-controlled drones are a positive innovation for society if they are used to check the condition of Hydro-Québec power lines or monitor forest fires in the Canadian North. But the same instruments can be armed and used for military purposes.”
Looking at things from different angles
With the emergence of these innovations, Martineau has noticed that the role of ethics advisors in organizations is evolving. “Businesses want to avoid making rash choices about technology,” she says. “They don’t want to develop or buy a product that could negatively impact their activities, their reputation or, worse still, the trust people have in them, a crucial concept in ethics.”
Internally, ethics managers can help organizations identify and map issues to put in place mechanisms to better manage them. “For example, if an artificial intelligence system is discriminatory, how can it be corrected?” she says. “How do we ensure that our decisions aren’t biased because of technology?”
These are precisely the questions that ethics managers must address, working with people who are familiar with the technical and technological aspects of the issue. “You can’t go it alone,” she says. “Understanding the jargon and establishing a dialogue between these different areas of expertise is no easy task. We need to learn to work across disciplines.” Ethics advisors must expand their horizons to get an accurate picture of the situation and to avoid blind spots.
“We need to be able to manage our practices, ask why we are doing things in a particular way, identify the risks associated with technology and get people to think more broadly,” she says. You don’t have to be a technology whiz, but simply to ask the right questions and anticipate the impact on the business’s activities.
The ethics and compliance function was formalized in major organizations some 15 years ago, but in smaller companies the guardians of values are often management, she says. They can nevertheless be given the tools to deal with these issues, in particular through Executive Education HEC Montréal’s Certification in Ethics and Compliance, which explores the ethical implications of technology.
“We no longer have to convince managers of the importance of ethics in an organization,” she says. “We now need to learn to effectively integrate the ethical dimension into the general management of the business.” These issues will likely get a lot of ink in 2025.
Learn more
Looking to hone your skills to better identify and solve ethical dilemmas? Executive Education HEC Montréal’s Certification in Ethics and Compliance addresses the many aspects of ethics, including the impact of technology.