Yet raising awareness without setting guardrails would be unwise. “You can’t just give it to everybody and say, ‘experiment’,” Mr Pourteymour says, noting the high stakes in an industry “where you are dealing with lots of regulations”. When Rolls-Royce began rolling out its AI tools, it set a number of constraints. The firm’s cyber, legal and commercial teams drew up clear AI policies covering both “product safety” and “organisational safety”, designed to safeguard the firm’s data assets and ensure compliance with the European Union’s AI rules.
To give its employees a common and safe route into the technology, Rolls-Royce has built an internal AI framework called AiRR, short for AI for Rolls-Royce. Mr Pourteymour describes it as a “Swiss Army knife” of AI tools, spanning traditional machine learning, generative AI and, more recently, autonomous AI agents. AiRR gives the firm oversight over how its employees use the technology and helps prevent the use of unlicensed tools (read about shadow AI use in this series). It also inherits Rolls-Royce’s existing permission structures, so an AI agent can do only what the employee using it is allowed to do. That guards against privilege creep, limits the damage from over-eager automation and keeps the firm’s AI use auditable, which is handy in an industry where regulators take a close interest in both innovation and mistakes.