A team of researchers at Trinity College Dublin has secured €365,000 in funding to develop an AI-driven platform to address failings in ethics and compliance.
The platform, called IntegrityIQ, will be a spin-out of Trinity Business School and is supported by The Learnovate Centre, a global research and innovation centre in learning technologies in Trinity College Dublin.
The €365,000 funding was granted under Enterprise Ireland's Commercialisation Fund.
The researchers behind the project say that companies continue to suffer huge losses as a result of unethical behaviour.
Last year, 16 Wall Street firms were fined a combined $1.8 billion because of inappropriate staff behaviour despite having existing regulatory and compliance training in place.
IntegrityIQ will provide an immersive environment for employees to share perceptions about integrity risks and corporate culture.
It will also facilitate the process to make protected disclosures (whistleblowing) and will capture relevant data that is available in real-time for internal and external reporting processes.
On the platform, each employee will engage within an immersive, innovative and completely confidential environment.
They will create an avatar and will enter a simulation where they to deal with a series of ethical dilemmas.
The project is based on a concept developed by Dr Daniel Malan, an expert in the field of Organisational Integrity and Director of the Trinity Corporate Governance Lab at Trinity Business School.
"This product fills a gap in the market," Dr Malan said.
"Many large multinational companies struggle with ethics and compliance training. Companies are always looking for innovative ways to address these risks," he added.
