AI and Consumers, with Helena Leurent

Back to this study that I mentioned before: There is a great awareness that our world is changing. Is this technology being used to help? Is it being used especially in a meaningful way? A lot of the time we are finding things like digital finance, for example, introduced into the marketplace. Does it do anything better than what we had before? Does it introduce new risks that I did not have to deal with before? I think one of the approaches that we try to take is: How do we chart a path forward that helps people access, use, and get the best out of technology but not fall into the traps, the risks, and the very real scams that are out there that are becoming more prevalent?

I think you cannot paint with an incredibly broad brush; you have to look at an individual level, and we should be doing that, and this does differ very much by region. Perhaps if I take a step back and try to look, that might be where we are.

WENDELL WALLACH: When you say it changes by region, what have you observed in terms of preponderance of attitudes from region to region or at least preponderance of concerns or excitement?

HELENA LEURENT: A classic would be in Korea, for example. With a younger demographic you get a very different adoption of technology and familiarity with technology, and therefore you are going to need to be looking at things like: How does consumer policy, how does the way we look after consumers, differ for people who are very comfortable with a gaming environment or with Bitcoin? There is a much faster adoption there and a much great familiarity there versus in places where you are seeing access issues.

I was looking at some of the stats from the World Bank Findex Report, and I think 30 or possibly 40 percent of women in Morocco, I believe it was, have access to a financial institution. So we have enormous disparities which are increasing. That was happening before the pandemic. The pandemic has exacerbated that. We are talking about not just a tale of two cities but a tale of some very divergent stories happening here.

WENDELL WALLACH: Yes. According to the International Telecommunications Union, we still have 2.5 billion people who have no access to the Internet at all.

HELENA LEURENT: Exactly.

WENDELL WALLACH: The preponderance of those are in particular regions of the world—parts of Asia, Africa, some of South America, some island countries, and so forth.

That is probably the number-one thing we have to address, but I think we are going to stick with AI in this particular podcast. We have had others who have talked specifically to the access issue, so I think we will try to stick a little bit more to at least the consumers in those regions who have actual access and are aware of AI, even if they may not be indulging any AI application that they know of. When I say, “that they know of,” there is a great deal of difference between ChatGPT and the fact that AI is already built into nearly all browsers.

HELENA LEURENT: Absolutely. Even though there may be very great disparities in access, when we bring together our consumer advocates one of the key things we try to do is make sure the consumer advocates in the Global South are present so we can build capacity for their involvement in conversations about AI. We need to include those voices and find ways of including consumer advocates connecting to regulators so that we can respond and, to the extent that we can, get ahead or at least catch up with or get close to some of the conversations.

WENDELL WALLACH: That is interesting to me. Tell me about how you help them build their capacity so they truly can represent the consumers in their regions.

HELENA LEURENT: You have a variety of things that consumer advocates do.

One, they are in direct contact with consumers in their countries. They are often a trusted voice, so they will be having conversations which are clearly two-way. Consumers will be coming to them with complaints, issues, or questions. Some consumer advocates help with debt counseling, all sorts of different services, so we really understand what are the issues that we are hearing and raising those so that we can get answers back to consumers.

The Consumer Council of Zimbabwe, for example, has 336 consumer groups around the country that they speak to on a regular basis. If the Consumer Council has information that they can share back, if they are trained up, they can be educating and informing consumers in the country—“Well, this is what you can look for; this is how you can act as a consumer and get the best”—not just the best deal but the fairest deal, understand the marketplace around you, and use it to best advantage.

WENDELL WALLACH: Does Consumers International function as an educator for these groups so they know what—

HELENA LEURENT: They can be, yes. The next stage is that many of these groups then interact with governments and with businesses locally as well. They will act as ombudsmen, they will advise on policy, and they will be heavily involved in what is going on there, so what they can do is take what they are seeing on the ground and translate that into potentially more agile policy. They can also highlight to businesses: “Well, this seems to be happening. Can you react to it? Can you respond?”

To respond to your question, Consumers International can then work across borders, so we can say: “Look, we are seeing this phenomenon here, we are seeing this policy development here. Might this work in your context?” That is an interesting exchange of best practice. Then what you can do is you can say: “Well, let’s do a test or let’s find out what people around the world are experiencing on a particular topic,” put that together, and then share that with the United Nations or with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). We have done that on a couple of issues around personalized pricing—What are people’s attitudes toward personalized pricing? What can happen in terms of discrimination?—so you can get this interesting global perspective.

More recently we have done this to look at how consumers have experienced the cost-of-living crisis and how you can help them through that, especially with energy prices. There is so much that can be done if we can get the conversation going faster, get information flowing faster, and get best practices flowing faster across borders.

WENDELL WALLACH: I gather, Helena, that some of the membership organizations have a great deal of political clout within their countries where others, such as Consumer Reports, that everyone knows in the United States, are not necessary seen as having political importance as much as just evaluating products and are therefore playing into the marketplace.

HELENA LEURENT: In fact I would say all of them are asked by their respective governments for their views, and all of them in some way, shape, or form on at least one issue will be in regular contact giving guidance and sharing what consumers are doing. Consumer Reports has a fantastic team focused on advocacy because they know that you cannot be listening to what consumers are experiencing and you cannot solve their problems unless you are advocating for change back in the rest of the system.

We did a survey of all of our members around the world, and there are certain issues—food, food safety, food security, product safety, a variety of different topics—where consumer advocates over decades have been working closely to push policymakers to make change happen. They get heavily involved in standard setting when we have the capacity to do that.

It is actually on technology, on things like AI, where that conversation has not gotten into place, and it needs to. We have the models to have those conversations so consumers are connected in to how the marketplace evolves and transforms, but we have not put it in place yet for the emerging technologies that will transform our futures. We need to put that in place.

WENDELL WALLACH: Let’s talk about what that might be. Let’s first talk about the relationship between you and your member organizations. What do you see needs to take place so that your member organizations can represent the consumers—and we will talk specifically about AI, though I have been pointing out for years that if we can get it right with AI, then we can go on to biotech and all the other emerging technologies.

It seems that we are relatively new for these consumer advocate groups to understand or take a leading role in relationship to AI. Is that true or not, or do you see some of them already doing so?

HELENA LEURENT: The Norwegian Consumer Council has been focused on this for a very long time and just came out with a fantastic report about generative AI and consumer rights, Consumer Reports you mentioned, some of the European advocacy groups, in particular consumer advocacy groups, typically have the capacity and also have seen the shifts in their marketplaces. Hong Kong, Korea, and Thailand are watching this very, very closely.

I would point to a number of organizations that are looking at how technology can assist consumers even more, like: How will technologies help consumers gain the right sort of knowledge and power in the marketplace? Can I look up what my rights are and how I act in a particular situation so I can get redress better? There are some interesting opportunities here.

Absolutely not every consumer advocacy organization has that in place, by any means. This is complex for businesses let alone nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). We have been fortunate enough to have support from, in this case, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They were able to support us. We now work across 65 countries with consumer organizations to train them up, in this case on digital finance, to help give them the platform to connect in with their local regulators and with international conversations on how digital finance evolves, and you can start to get into the meaningful ways in which you are showing what is the experience of a vulnerable consumer and what might be the shifts that could improve that. How can we serve that consumer even better?

I think currently we have trained a couple of hundred consumer advocates on this through the training programs, but it is more than that. It is not just the training; it is putting training into practice. That is when you can see things work, and you build this incredible community of people who are like: “Right, okay. We are exchanging around the world how things can be made better.”

WENDELL WALLACH: When you are talking about training and the vulnerable consumer, has that tapped into the vulnerabilities that AI creates for them particularly. It is not just AI, but the level of scams that are appearing throughout the digital environment are out of control, but we do know that AI specifically is going to upgrade the complexity of those scams dramatically over the next year or two.

HELENA LEURENT: Yes. One of the things about this network is that you see change coming at you before you read about it. We had been very, very concerned about scams before, but as the pandemic started and people had to go online one of the key problems that consumer advocates were talking about was the level and the scope of scams, and it has not stopped since. It is absolutely shocking.

When people talk about rebuilding trust in the marketplace, I am like: “Well, there are a lot of ways you can do that, but if you do not look at the underlying experience that people are having”—each time they are going online or each time they are trying to interact, they are faced with a whole different system and a dark forest of “Where am I going with this?” and “Can I trust?” we are not going to get very far. It is not the Wild West. So many of the consumer protection practices actually can help in this situation. We need to use them, and we are not using them.

At the same time, there is new territory. There are new experiences, new news cases, and new problems that this will bring for consumers everywhere. We have not effectively dug into that, and we have not got the approaches to be able to solve for them.

WENDELL WALLACH: I am wondering, is there any kind of initiative in motion for you to deal with issues such as consumer scams on an international level, or do you view that primarily as getting correct policies in place nation by nation?

HELENA LEURENT: As soon as the pandemic started you saw a vast increase in scams around the world. Consumer advocates tend to be able to see issues before you are reading about them in the press because they are talking to consumers on the ground and get this edge case experience of what is happening in real time, and the level of scams has just been extraordinary. If we do not solve for that, we will not rebuild trust in the marketplace. We will fail in creating a way in which technology can help us, help connect people, and create a fair, safe, and sustainable marketplace.

Absolutely we are responding to that. Yes, we help on an individual level, but our unique value is coming together and having a global conversation about this. There are a couple of things we can do:

The first is, to those who are not in this world, it is just one day, but World Consumer Rights Day is a day that has been in place since the 1980s. It is a day when anybody in the world of consumer protection and empowerment thinks about and works on—and often it is not just for a day but for a month—consumer rights. There are campaigns, all sorts of social media efforts, and consumer experts going to schools and talking about consumer rights.

Consumers International picks the theme for World Consumer Rights Day each year. It is on March 15. Last year we focused on energy unsurprisingly. The campaign ran in about 90 countries.

For 2024 we are going to focus on fair and responsible AI. This was a topic that was chosen by our members. They were absolutely excited all the way around the world to focus on this because they know that it impacts all of us.

The way we are going to approach it is to look at, how do you as a consumer experience AI and what does AI do to your understanding of consumer rights? If you go onto a chatbot, for example, and ask questions, what is the nature of the advice you get? How useful is it? What guidance can we then give back about how we improve AI so it is genuinely useful? That is number one; we can do global campaigns.

Number two is then looking at how the system works when things go wrong. We were most recently at the Internet Governance Forum, we were at the G7 meetings, saying: “If we are going to look at the way data flows around the world, we need that to be flowing so that we can achieve our Sustainable Development Goals and we need that to be creating efficiency.” If those data flows do not get built with a consumer’s ability to achieve redress—so, if something goes wrong for me as an individual consumer and my data is flowing around the world—how do I get payback when things go wrong? Who do I tell? How do I work in that system, especially when my data crosses borders? The system we build globally has to cater for that question because else why would I take part in that system? Why would I ever trust it if when things go wrong I don’t know what to do and I cannot seem to get very much help from the system?

We are putting together in this case a study looking at, for different sectors, what a system that allows redress, that supports redress, would look like, and pushing that back to the folks who are thinking about this, especially at the G7 and the OECD, etc.

So campaigns, research, and proposals, and then beyond that we can bring businesses together, for example, looking at fake reviews. Online our member Which UK has assessed that maybe one in seven reviews is fake. Reviews and seeing consumer perspectives online should be one of the greatest ways in which we share our human knowledge. It should be a real source and fount of fantastic insight for people like you. Yet, if we cannot trust those, again our belief in the online marketplace, what is the point?

Bringing businesses together to say, “Well, how can we go after the bad actors?” but also, “How can we put in place rules that you follow?” can be enormously powerful. That is a third example of what we can do at a global level to help.

WENDELL WALLACH: That’s great. From where I sit, I suspect that in 2024 the major issue will be disinformation and scams because this new universe of disinformation, of deep fakes, of generative AI has opened up such a tremendous capacity for that to take place. Not only that, 24 nations of the world are going to have national elections this coming year, and that is going to be a seedbed to see whether democracy can withstand the level of disinformation that is likely to be put out there, so I am thrilled to hear that you folks are on top of that and recognize that as a major theme.

Beyond scams and misinformation, is there some other issue that you find where AI is raising a prominent concern for your members?

HELENA LEURENT: When we think of the future of the marketplace we hope for a future which is fairer, which is safer, and which is more sustainable, where things like food waste and our food system have been made more efficient, where people have access to affordable, nutritious, and sustainable diets, and where people are not having to think constantly about how to improve their energy efficiency, that sustainable consumption is the norm.

When we are working on digital rights we are thinking about what that does for the marketplace and for the planet as well. How does AI help us achieve some of those goals, or how does AI, poorly implemented, prevent us achieving some of those goals? Those are the very long-term but urgent questions all consumer advocates have in their minds.

WENDELL WALLACH: All of those are areas where at least AI advocates claim it can help us address those concerns. Is that your sense from what you have seen so far, or are you seeing a lot of evidence that that is not the case?

HELENA LEURENT: I have been in conversations about if we can see the way in which plants are grown, the way in which water is used in agriculture, if we can use data more effectively, there is so much more we can do with agriculture, health, so in many of these sectors you are seeing change that AI could help. The problem I suspect is that these are not necessarily being developed in a way that allows transparency or that allows us to see how we build those so that we are including the folks who have that knowledge, keeping them open so that we can test them and see if they are actually doing what it says on the tin, and showing that at the end these achieve the results that we are trying to.

A lot of the conversations we get into are, “Well, will people pay more for sustainable products?” Some people can and will; many people cannot. We are getting to a point where you have conversations like this: “Can we put the price up of a foodstuff in a supermarket because we need to for that sustainable product to be put in front of consumers?”

If you do not show people that the extra money they might have to pay goes back to farmers, that it actually does achieve its end goal, we are again destroying trust. I think that transparency, redress, and the way in which some of these technologies are deployed is essential for that future system to work.

WENDELL WALLACH: That is about, do we really get the message down to the level of the consumer or not?

HELENA LEURENT: It is not just the message, it is how it works. It is not just about telling the consumer that it is transparent but finding ways to demonstrate and prove that the change is there and change is possible.

WENDELL WALLACH: How would you do that? Is it that you expect certain systems to just work, or do you try to make the consumers aware that some of these better-quality sustainable products in the long run will lower the costs of their healthcare? How do you try to transmit that?

HELENA LEURENT: At the end of the day the majority of people will not be able to afford that shift, so a lot of it is that you have to go back into the system, you have to go back into business models, and you have to see where we can create different ways of the business models that even connect consumers to farmers and rethink that. That is where there may be additional uses of AI.

You are not going to be able to rely on consumers as a group to push this change. We are going to have to find enough to create the flywheel effect, and then it is about making sustainable consumption the norm and easy for people to get involved in as opposed to trying to make people aware.

WENDELL WALLACH: Let’s talk about how that gap might be filled. Do you see it with getting national policies that facilitate the development of sustainable products or do you see that the NGO community might be able to get involved and cover the gap between products that are not healthy but are cheap and the more expensive ones—is all of that getting involved in the marketplace in a way that is problematic?

HELENA LEURENT: I don’t think there is any one answer. Everything has to happen at once. The base problem is that there is not enough conversation about sustainable consumption or getting people involved in changes in the marketplace. There are loads of conversations about the Fourth Industrial Revolution and about the energy transition, but all of these are without really thinking through how you make that happen with and for people.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says about 40 to 70 percent of the energy transition has to happen when people adopt more energy efficient technologies. Where is the strategy? Where is the joined-up thinking? Where is the approach to make that happen and make it easier for people to do? That is the missing piece, and that missing piece has to involve every single element, from standards to information and education to business practice, changes in policy, to you name it. You cannot rely on a single silver bullet for this.

WENDELL WALLACH: You mentioned the IPCC. The evidence is not great that we are going to stem climate change quickly enough, and that means that we are going to have an increasingly large percentage of consumers who are refugees or migrants in one form or another. Is that something that comes into play for the work at Consumers International at all?

HELENA LEURENT: It does. Consumer advocacy exists in many countries, many of which where the political, economic, or environmental situation is very, very difficult. We had consumer advocates in Ukraine, Yemen, Sudan, and in Myanmar in very different situations, often where either the leadership in some cases had to leave the country, so even though we are consumer advocates, apolitical, neutral, and very much focused on how the marketplace functions as NGOs, we have seen a very diverse set of situations around the world.

Consumer advocates absolutely get involved in how refugees are supported. Clearly when people are forced to leave their country there are certain needs they have, but as they settle: How do I rent a car? How do I get a telephone? How do I open a bank account? Many of these conflicts can last for a very long period of time, and you have to set up your life in that new location. Consumer advocates have been involved in giving advice and guidance and providing how to ensure that refugees are welcomed in their new country and advice on how as a refugee you can set up your life.

We are seeing that that is happening far too frequently. It certainly is something that unfortunately we may have to do more of as we look forward: What does consumer protection and empowerment look like when it is about helping people be resilient and when it is about helping people through multiple crises? That is a very different type of consumer protection and policy than you would have had when consumer protection was talked about in the 1950s.

WENDELL WALLACH: Particularly when we are talking about 5 to 15 percent of consumers being potentially refugees or migrants in coming generations.

This gets me back to what I will call the “bottom-up” aspect of consumer advocacy. A lot of what we have been talking about has been how the national groups represent the consumers in their constituency and how they educate the consumers in their constituency. We have also been trying to get a little bit about this question of the political clout of the consumer.

Are consumer groups coalescing to champion the benefits and minimize the risks of AI? I am sure they are on fronts such as grain flows and so forth. What about in the AI realm? Are they doing that yet, or do you think that is something that is germinating but has not really borne fruit yet?

HELENA LEURENT: You are right. We have gotten together and presented a united front at places like the UN Food System Summit or the Conference of the Parties. I think the voice of consumer advocacy has not gotten fully to the table on conversations about AI, and yet it can give so much richness to the conversation and add so much not just in terms of knowledge but also how might you make this fairer or how might you make this more responsible and how can we have an ongoing real conversation with people as we see how this works and how this unfolds.

I am hoping that World Consumer Rights Day creates a moment where we can partner with organizations, where we can start to learn ourselves, and where we can start to explore where we can add the most value because of course there are so many incredible digital rights or digital organizations and experts. What is it that the consumer advocacy movement can bring to this because it could be an incredible pairing and joint effort that is launched from that?

I would love your views. Wendell, what would you love to see from World Consumer Rights Day 2024?

WENDELL WALLACH: I would love to see it use the challenges AI is creating for consumers as a platform to coalesce in a way where you represent to the international community that consumers have to be dealt with as a group as a whole. I don’t know if I am being fully clear there.

I have not known much about Consumer Rights Day. I imagine it passed and I may have noticed some of the issues, but it seems to me that something is happening at this generative AI moment, that the level of concerns and the prospects of a technology that is so useful can also be so harmful to consumers. I think it may actually be creating an opportunity for you to coalesce in a way that the shared interests and the shared need that consumers have that these groups are representing could get out there as a reality and something that has to be built upon and just use AI in the disinformation and challenges it is creating for consumers as a platform for that.

HELENA LEURENT: That is a fantastic idea. You are coming to our Global Congress in Nairobi in December.

WENDELL WALLACH: I am, yes. Why don’t you take a moment and tell us what is going to happen in Nairobi in December?

HELENA LEURENT: Absolutely. We usually get together online ourselves. We can get together in small groups, but as a global community we only come together once every four years, so it is a pretty special moment. At the global congress we elect our next council and board. More importantly we have a conversation about what we are learning and where we want to go in the next four years. We invite in experts, leaders, government, civil society, and business leaders who are leaning into this concept of consumer rights and consumer protection and empowerment.

Let’s face it. It is sort of a consumer care revolution. You cannot go through the level of changes we are seeing in the world without completely revolutionizing how you look after your consumers and what customer care means. It is an old concept that needs renewing.

We are going to be having that meeting in Nairobi, Kenya. I am excited that we will be there and hosted by the Competition Authority of Kenya and the Competition Authority of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, looking at all of the topics I think we have covered in this podcast, from finance to sustainable consumption to AI, and not just having the conversation but asking, “Where next, and how do we work together?”

Every single session should be like: “All right, what is the impact we believe needs to be in place for people to benefit from a fair, safe, and sustainable marketplace?” I am grateful that you will be there, Wendell, to animate the conversation on AI, and I hope you use that challenge to the group about starting to be part of that conversation, set the pace, and bring whatever consumer advocacy can bring to the table.

WENDELL WALLACH: This conversation has stimulated those brain cells that make me now know what message or what I will be bringing.

HELENA LEURENT: Excellent. Thank you so much.

WENDELL WALLACH: Helena, this has been a truly wonderful podcast, and you have covered all kinds of things that I think very few of our listeners will have necessarily been thinking about.

I want to finish up on whether there are some last messages for our listeners, given who they are. Listeners are often international leaders. We sometimes get a few people from multinational corporations who listen in, certainly leadership from NGOs and civil society. Is there a last message you would want to leave for them on how they can help in the mission of Consumers International, particularly as it relates to the introduction of AI and other emerging technologies?

HELENA LEURENT: Thank you for asking that. Maybe because I was trained in history, I feel that there is so much from the past that we can learn and use to face the challenges of the future. Consumers International is a 60-year-old organization. Consumer advocacy started at the end of the 1800s, usually with women in countries seeing how the products they were buying were made. It is now a global phenomenon, and consumer policy has been built from the 1900s on. Yet it is quite invisible. It does not have the prominence that perhaps it could and should have.

When I hear, for example, in Davos people saying, “You know, we need to engage with people, we need to engage this technocratic, top-down conversation and then actually work with and for people on the issue,” there are many ways to do that, but I do feel that consumer advocacy is one of the old but potentially very modern approaches to do that.

If every single person goes into the market—the vast majority of us, whether you like the term or not, are consumers in the marketplace, so our behavior, the way we act, is essential and has to change. So consumer policy, protection, empowerment, and advocacy can be some of the ways in which we fairly and responsibly include people in these incredible changes that we are going to see and experience.

Is consumer advocacy fit for purpose? I think the beauty of this as well is that people are ready to challenge that and ready to evolve it, but there are some interesting lessons that we can take and tools that we can use that make sense and that fit a way of building that feels innovative but also thoughtful and responsible.

WENDELL WALLACH: That is fantastic and right to the point. I have long advocated for the need for citizen education and full engagement, particularly around emerging technologies, but that is just because we focus on emerging technologies. It is thrilling to hear that your organization is there, is young, and my hope is that it will have growing influence over the coming years.

HELENA LEURENT: Thank you so much, Wendell. It is great to be able to talk to you. All power to you. Take care.

WENDELL WALLACH: Thank you ever so much, Helena, for sharing your time, insights, and expertise with us. This has indeed been another rich and thought-provoking discussion.

Thank you to our listeners for tuning in, and a special thanks to the team at the Carnegie Council for hosting and producing this podcast. For the latest content on ethics in international affairs, be sure to follow us on social media and at carnegiecouncil.org. My name is Wendell Wallach, and I hope we earned the privilege of your time. Thank you.