AI Governance at Europe's Largest Retailer

Schwarz Group is not only Europe’s largest retailer (Lidl, Kaufland) but also highly vertically integrated thanks to its food manufacturing, waste management and recycling capabilities. Longstanding invests in Data and AI have led to a large variety of AI applications operated at all branches of Schwarz group, while AI technologies in general have become more and more ubiquitous. 

With this success, and particularly in the light of the European Union’s AI Act, the need for an efficient AI governance framework on group level becomes glaring. To this end, we established an AI governance board that coordinates AI governance initiatives and internal regulations for all branches while keeping responsibilities and accountabilities within the business units. At the same time, our updated “AI Codex” has become the concise guideline towards our values about AI and the relatively brief but comprehensive framework to identify critical AI-specific core criteria for trustworthy and ethical products. 

In this presentation, we elaborate on how the AI governance board is set up, what its goals are, how it interacts with other governance entities within the group, e.g., legal or revision, and on its responsibilities as well as their limitations. Moreover, the idea of the AI Codex and its practical application is presented together with other governance tools that we developed.