Ep. 12 – Chloe Poynton: Human rights as a business responsibility

“Human rights aren’t things that happen over there. They show up in everyday business decisions.”

– Chloe Poynton

 

Chloe Poynton is the co-founder of Article One Advisors, a global consultancy that works with companies to put people and human rights at the center of business, from supply chains and product design to emerging technology and AI governance. They have partnered with organizations ranging from major consumer brands to tech platforms and manufacturers, helping them move beyond surface-level compliance towards real change.

Chloe shares her path from humanitarian work in refugee camps with the UN and why she shifted to working with businesses. We talk about what actually changes when businesses stop treating human rights as a compliance exercise and start treating them as a lived responsibility.

 

What we talk about:

  • The difference between preventing harm vs repairing harm — might sound simple, but it isn’t!
  • Why every company has a responsibility to human rights, whether they acknowledge it or not
  • How incentives, governance, and KPIs directly shape ethical outcomes
  • Real stories of uncovering and remediating harm inside complex global companies
  • What it means that the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights is a process document
  • How AI changes the scale of risk, but NOT the underlying responsibility
  • What gives Chloe hope, even in a turbulent moment for values-led work

Join us to talk about how care, accountability, and dignity can be implemented inside large, messy systems, and why centering people in business is often about designing better structures to hold them and their work.

This interview covers a lot of ground with a lot of heart.

 

 

Action items:

  • What are you incentivizing in your business, and how does that impact human rights?
  • Have you ever thought of the supply chain of the services and software you use in your business? How might you start looking deeper?

 

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Read the raw transcript:

[00:00:08] Janel: Welcome to Flying the Coop, a podcast about rethinking how business works and who It should work for.

[00:00:12] Anna: We’re Janel and Ana, small business owners learning in public as we turn our company Strange Birds into a worker owned co op. Today we’re interviewing Chloe Poynson, co founder of Article 1 Advisors, a global consultancy that works with companies to put people and human rights at the center of business.

From supply chains to product design to emerging technology and AI governance. Article 1 just celebrated its 10 year anniversary.

[00:00:39] Chloe: Woo hoo.

[00:00:40] Anna: That’s a huge deal by the way.

[00:00:42] Chloe: We are very excited.

[00:00:44] Anna: Yeah.

You’ve partnered with organizations ranging from major consumer brands, tech platforms, manufacturers, helping them move beyond surface level compliance toward real change. I don’t know why I rolled my R, but it felt important.

[00:00:59] Chloe: Sounded great.

[00:01:00] Janel: I love the flourish. Yeah. Chloe’s work basically is it translates what can sound like these big abstract ideals into tangible day to day decisions that shape how companies actually operate. Which is why we were so interested in talking with Chloe, because her work touches one of the central questions of this podcast. How do you build businesses that truly really center people, especially when things get big and gnarly and complex? So to kind of kick us off for listeners who may not know Article 1 or may not have thought about human rights much in a business context at all, what kind of problems do people usually come to article one with?

[00:01:36] Chloe: Yeah, well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. This is so exciting and I want to go back to the archive and listen to all of the folks that you’ve had on before. As Ana said, we work with companies across a range of sectors and a range of geographies. So there’s no place other than maybe Antarctica or no continent that we haven’t worked on other than Antarctica. Companies come to us either because they know that literally every company in the world has the ability to positively or negatively affect people, and they want to proactively understand where those pain points may be and then figure out what are the right management practices, policies, strategies, product fixes that need to happen in order to mitigate that risk. And that could be driven by either by a desire to really live corporate values, or to align with emerging regulation, or because they’ve gotten some criticism externally at a sector level or at a company level.

The second big reason is if a crisis is manifested, if their technology has been misused to harm people or their products are being built with child or forced labor and they become aware of this in some way, shape or form, that it’s directly linked to their business. They’ll come to us to really dig deep, try and understand what is this specific issue, what responsibility do they have, what can be done to fix it, what can be done to remediate it. So make sure it doesn’t happen again and make sure those that have been harmed have some sort of compensation or remediation moving forward. And I think you would ask kind of who benefits or whose experience has kind of changed the most from this. And we really see it’s the people that are kind of at those decision making choke points. So it’s like the product leaders or the sustainability team or it’s human resources or procurement, legal, the connection to the harm, who’s sitting in that nexus. Those are the ones who tend to have these kind of light bulb moments that human rights are not these things that kind of happen over there or are not relevant to business or not relevant to the company, but actually are relevant to business, are relevant to their company and, and are relevant to their role. And so they become kind of empowered to understand the business choices that they need to make, whether it’s the vendors they select or the markets they enter, or the way they’re designing the technology or the way in which they’re listening or not to workers in local communities who could be harmed. Their jobs are kind of ideally the ones that change the most through an engagement with us. And our goal, our hope is that once that kind of light bulb goes off, that it is a responsibility of business, it is a responsibility of their company and they are the kind of change agent inside who can actually make the change happen. But it’s actually an empowering feeling rather than one that’s overwhelming. Right. We want to equip them with the tools, with the resources, with the actionable plans that meet them where they’re at, but start to move the needle in the right direction.

[00:04:24] Anna: I would love to know. This seems like a very niche job that you got into. What personally got you into this line of work? Yeah, both what got you in there and then what keeps you there. We’d love to hear some stories from you.

[00:04:39] Chloe: Yeah, well, I’m originally from the UK and my family came over when I was 10. It was during the migration crisis from Central America and so I was living in the Bay Area and there were all of these families fleeing horrors and coming to the Bay. It was this moment where I was like my parents did the same thing, right? They moved from country A to country B, but it was voluntary. We were not fleeing anything. We were not in fear of our life. My parents weren’t worried about the safety and security of their children. We were being warmly welcomed here in the US and given all of the opportunities. Right. I went to wonderful schools and had amazing community.

And I saw our neighbors not having that same warm welcome and recognizing that they were coming from such horrific situations. And so just kind of, you know, at a very young age, just started to, like, why is that? What is. What’s going on? That people have such different experiences, both in terms of where they’re coming from and how they’re being received.

And then I went to college, and I studied anthropology and international studies and had a focus on human rights and humanitarian responses and spent a long time studying genocide, studying armed conflict. Then I had a fellowship to spend a year living and working in refugee camps. So I was kind of traveling all over the world to conflict zones and really trying to understand what forces people to move. What can the international community do to try and limit the harm that they’ve experienced?

And then I joined the un. I worked for the UN in Sierra Leone, went to an NGO focused on transitional justice. And then I went to graduate school with the thought that I was going to go back and work for the UN refugee agency, that I was going to spend my life living and working in conflict zones and spent some time in Sudan. And I just realized that the. I just felt like the impact I was having was so minimal, if at all, and that there might even be cases where the international humanitarian community was causing some harm. And I didn’t really feel like I kind of could wrap my head fully around it, and that I had the ability to control the impact that I had. And so when I was in grad school, I had a professor ask me, you know, why are you so focused on the band aid after the harm? What about preventing the harm from happening in the first place?

And let me just plant this little idea in your brain that good, decent work keeps society stable. And so people feel like they’ve got purpose in their work, that they’re being treated fairly, that they’re being treated with dignity, with respect.

The instability that can lead to conflict, and then these dramatic human rights harms that they’re experienced at all levels of society could potentially be avoided. Now, that’s a very simplistic way of looking at it, but it did kind of raise this question of me, like, well, who’s talking to business about this? This is such a huge role that they play in society.

And I had never even made the link between business and kind of peace and stability.

So I spent a year just literally interviewing people like, have you thought about this? Who’s doing this work? Who’s providing this guidance? And the year that I graduated grad school, the UN released a set of principles called the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. And that basically set the framework for what companies should do. And so I was able to just very seamlessly go from graduate school into this field that was just emerging, that was saying, okay, businesses do have a responsibility when it comes to human rights, and this is what the responsibility is. And so I was helping companies implement those steps, that guidance that the UN had released.

And what keeps me in it today is exactly what got me out of the broader humanitarian space in the past, which is I can see impact every day, and it’s fast. Right? Like, if you’re trying to change a law in a country, that is such important work. So I’m in no way diminishing it. It is essential. It needs to happen. It makes our jobs easier. But it can take 10 years, it can take 20 years. It can be watered down. It can just be incredibly challenging. But I’ve worked with companies where I’ve been able to say, this policy needs to change because this harm is happening and it gets signed off. And if you’re a technology platform that’s a billion people whose lives could be changed overnight. And to see that impact so directly and so quickly is incredibly empowering and exciting and kind of makes me want to get up every day and. And figure out what’s that new thing that can create that change where tomorrow someone’s life will be better because of this change this company’s implemented today?

[00:09:26] Janel: I imagine a lot of your work is under NDA. Are there stories you can share about that impact that you’ve had and help us understand in a tangible way what actually happens?

[00:09:37] Chloe: Yeah, I can give a story without giving a company name, if that works for you.

So one example that really kind of brings this to life for me in a way that helps me be as committed as I am, was a huge impact assessment we were doing for a hotel company. So this was a big international brand. They have hotels in multiple countries. And the way that almost all hotels work is that they’ve got kind of a management team, and then they either directly hire 50% of the people in the hotel and then subcontract out another 50%, let’s say all of the cleaning staff, or it’s all subcontracted out. And so we were working with this company, and we were Doing interviews with their own staff, and they were being treated really well and talked about all of these career advancement opportunities.

And it really kind of brought to life the family feel that folks that were employed at this company felt. But then we started doing focus groups with the subcontracted staff. So these could be subcontracted or subcontracted where the hotel was hiring a labor broker, that labor broker maybe then worked with another labor broker. And so the chain of kind of visibility between where the company was, the hotel, and where these workers were coming from was getting more and more opaque.

And we spent a week interviewing, like, 300 of these workers. And what we started to hear was this repeated story of really horrific labor violations, some of which were kind of reaching the level of some of the most egregious labor violations you can. You can have.

And one guy came up to me after one of these focus groups and said, you know, I didn’t want to say this in front of anyone, but, you know, I haven’t been paid in six months, and one of my family members is sick, and I can’t afford to fly home because I haven’t been paid. And I also don’t have my passport because my employer has kept it, and I’ve asked for it, and I’ve asked to be paid, and, you know, I get a blank wall.

And that’s an indicator for forced labor. Right. So if you can’t access your travel documents, your identity documents, and therefore, you know, aren’t able to move freely if you aren’t being paid, these are indicators of forced labor. So I asked him if it was okay for me to report this incident to my client, because everything was kind of done under a, you let us know everything, and it will be anonymized. Like, nothing will be attributed to you. And he said, yes, of course, Please, if there’s anything they can do. So I called up my client, and within 24 hours, he had his passport back, he had back pay, and he was on a flight home to see his family members who were sick. My client, in no way, shape or form, wanted to be associated with this behavior, were treating their employees perfectly, but they were working with folks that didn’t have those same values, didn’t have those same processes in place to limit harm. And so once they knew about it, they could correct it, but oftentimes they don’t know. And so really applaud my client in this case for going out proactively and trying to uncover what the harms are. I’ll just say one other story, which was about the value of listening to people. I had a colleague who was recently in a very scary country where there’s a lot of surveillance and a lot of torture of dissidents and of folks that are not in support of the occupying government.

And she was speaking to folks about their experience. And one older gentleman just started crying and said, no one’s asked me.

No one has asked me what my thoughts are, what my experience is, what my perspectives are. And so just the fact of sitting down and looking someone eye to eye and saying, tell us about your experience. We can’t guarantee that we can change it, but we will do everything in our power to tell your story and see what we can change in terms of the policies, processes, et cetera, of the company. And so those moments of just being eye to eye with folks that are affected by company operations have always been the most impactful from my point of view.

[00:13:33] Anna: It’s amazing what happens when you start seeing people as humans and not as cogs in a machine.

It is such a simple yet radical shift, and it can change how every decision is made going forward.

I’m feeling rather emotional hearing these stories and having a hard time centering back into our questions.

When the businesses that come to you asking for help, do they come because they have to? Someone is telling them, maybe their customers or maybe some government entity or because they want to. Does it tend to land more in one bucket or the other?

[00:14:18] Chloe: Yeah, both and both. And for sure, we’ve got some companies that we’ve worked with for 10 years and they just get it and their leadership gets it, and they’re resourced to support it, and they want to be not only a good actor, but they want to be the. The company that sets the standard for the industry. So they’re not content to just say, we’re going to do everything within our little zone of influence, our big zone of influence, because are all very large companies, but we actually want to change the industry. We want to bring folks along and make sure that we all are doing the best that we can to try and make sure that our sector is one that really benefits people.

And so in that case, I’ve had the number two at a massive Fortune 500 company say to me, be more ambitious. Push us further.

Really challenge us to think about this as creatively and innovatively as possible.

And then we have companies that come to us because a crisis has happened and they just hadn’t made that connection between their company and human rights. And so it’s all new and they’re Kind of deers in headlights. And once they kind of make that connection, then it turns from this push to really a purpose driven decision. Right. So you often see this with big companies where there has been a crisis, there’s a pre and a post and the post is often a very different company. It’s different policies and processes, but mostly it’s different culture and that is what can really spark the change.

And then of course there are the companies that are just like, I don’t want to stick my head out, but I don’t want to fall behind. I want to make sure that I’m meeting regulatory expectations. I want to make sure that I’m meeting my obligations as a supplier to X or Y company.

And they just want to do the work and do it kind of as efficiently as possible and do the change necessary. But they’re not really here to revolutionize the field and revolutionize their industry. But the good news is, is that all of those create change, right? Like whether you’re doing it because you want to drastically change the way business is done or because you just need to do the thing, you’re still doing the thing. And so we are working to meet clients at every level, right? Like those that are super ambitious and that want to really challenge their industry, challenge the field. And, and those that are just trying to make sure they’re not gonna get in trouble and that they’re just going to put their head down and do the work.

[00:16:38] Anna: So the clients that you’ve had for 10 years that are like, what more can we do? We wanna do more. Like, let’s go.

Is there any advice you could give? Let’s say there’s someone in a company that’s like doing their best, that does mostly what you do, right? Like trying to help make sure things stay compliant, that they wanna make the change in the company and they, they brought them through a crisis, they’re on the other side, but they want that culture shift too. Not just, let’s just stay bare minimum regulatory. Right.

What kind of motivation helps that work continue so there isn’t another crisis. Right. It’s more proactive rather than reactive. The change is consistent and not just one off.

[00:17:21] Chloe: Yeah. And not just dependent on one person being there, Right. Like that person could move on and then all of a sudden.

[00:17:27] Anna: Exactly.

[00:17:28] Chloe: Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. I would say a couple things, right? You need to have the accountability system set up. So you need to have the governance structures, you need to have the incentives, you need to have the KPIs to really make the Values operational. And one of my favorite stories on those incentives that, that. That one of our clients did was they recognized that their sales team were incentivized to just sell, sell to anyone. Right. Like, you get your bonus based on the number of sales you do and the value of each of those sales.

And so there was zero incentive for them to say, I don’t know about this potential customer. They, like, they’re just giving some vibes that suggest that maybe they don’t have our values.

And so the company decided to set up an incentive structure whereby if someone felt like there was a potential sale that would not align with the company’s values because this customer might misuse the technology or be involved with a company or a country that wasn’t respecting human rights, that they could raise a kind of red flag and have that customer be reviewed. And if the customer was reviewed and it was determined, actually, yes, you’re right. These are not folks that we want to be doing business with. The salesperson still got the bonus.

And so your incentives are totally aligned. Right. Like, everyone wants to make sure that this company is doing business with the right folks. And we want to make sure that our workers, our employees, our sales teams got their Christmas bonus. Right? Right. It’s a win, win. And so those are the kind of things that you really need to make sure that it’s built in. And then everyone sees the value. And no one is kind of demoted or doesn’t get their bonus or is harmed in some way because of these requirements.

[00:19:11] Anna: It’s putting a different spin on that phrase. Like, you vote with your wallet. Right. As a consumer, you vote with your wallet, you pay for products, and you support companies and small businesses that you really believe in.

Same is true inside a business. Right. They’re voting with their wallet of, like, we’re putting our money where our mouth is, and we’re going to incentivize in a very specific way.

[00:19:30] Chloe: There’s such a strong business case that that is the best way to go. Right. Like the financial impact of being called in front of Congress because your products have been misused or having your name splattered across the COVID of the Wall Street Journal because your company has been associated with some egregious harm because of who you sold your products to.

Everybody wins in this situation. So there’s really, you know, the downside is so minimal, and you really kind of fortify and future proof yourself to make sure that the values that you have aligned on and recognize the value of are going to stay strong as.

[00:20:07] Janel: Like, Somebody who has worked in big corporate for a number of years, how critical those incentive structures really are. Because every little movement that you make as an individual in one of those giant organizations feels almost meaningless in comparison to the whole. And yet your individual actions are the essential building blocks of what creates that whole. So the thing that fuels you is absolutely essential to get right because that’s going to determine the direction in which you’re building.

I remember when I worked at Meta, there was lots and lots of emphasis on getting that thing, thing right. And I, I learned a lot from how important that was. And I imagine that you work with a lot of companies on exactly that.

[00:20:51] Chloe: Exactly, exactly. And then figuring out how do you translate it? Like how does that then show up when decisions are tough, when the potential customer is maybe the biggest customer you’ve ever had and there’s concerns like when the, the, the rubber hits the road, how do you ensure those values get to, to rule the day?

[00:21:13] Anna: In our co op structure, right, we have, it’s called patronage refunds, which is profit sharing, plain and simple. And it’s based purely on revenue that we have generated over X amount of time.

Part of this podcast is like us learning in public. Is there a way that we can think about profit beyond just the baseline revenue? Is there other bonuses that can be inserted there of the times when we say no or we actually tell a client, please don’t pay us that much. You don’t need us that much. Right. Because we do that rather often because we believe you should only pay what you need.

[00:21:44] Janel: How might we incentivize ourselves to rest more? I think that’s something we can both work on.

[00:21:49] Chloe: There’s a human right to rest at leisure.

[00:21:51] Janel: Right.

We’ll work with Article 1.

[00:21:54] Chloe: We’ll write it into our bylaws.

[00:21:57] Anna: Pretty good at resting.

[00:21:59] Janel: Speak for yourself.

I had a follow up question about something you said. Kind of triggered this thought of how sometimes those decisions of like what direction is the right direction is. They’re pretty complicated. And I’m reminded of the amazing TV series the Good Place with the point system for determining for what’s good and bad. Like you get plus 10 points for one action that’s ethical, but minus 150 because that tomato had been flown all the way here from across the world and you created carbon emissions. How do you deal with such complexity? When I imagine a big part of your work is writing very concrete structures into businesses, how do you manage how detailed that is?

[00:22:46] Chloe: Yeah, it’s such a good question. The one maybe slight tangent on that is that what really keeps me up at night is the concern that we have put in place a recommendation that has unintended consequences.

And I actually think, Janelle, probably your time at Meta, you saw this a lot because social media is one of those where you think, well, let’s ban this type of content.

You know, let’s ban any content related to human trafficking. You think, well, that’s a good idea. No one wants to be associated with human trafficking.

But now we’ve got someone from Syria who is looking for a trafficker to get them out of harm’s way and they’re putting on Facebook, hey, I’m willing to pay someone X amount of money to transport me and my family out of this country falls within the bucket of human trafficking. But it’s the good kind, you know, like, how do you make sure that your policies and processes are fit for purpose, that they’re not too broad, they’re not too narrow, they provide fluidity and the ability to really carve around the issues as they present in real life. Right? Rather than just these kind of black and white policies on the page. And so that’s a question that really challenges me and makes me go kind of, okay, we recommend X. If X is implemented, what’s Y, Z?

What are all of the potential follow on impacts? Does this have a disproportionate effect on those who are most vulnerable?

Can we change the policy or process in a way that will just limit that and make sure that it’s more of an even playing field?

Does it have a impact that makes sense in Western Europe but doesn’t make sense in Saudi Arabia? So take again another example from social media. If you’re a family in Finland and you’ve put photos of your kids on Facebook that are running around naked in the summer, totally appropriate, right? Like that’s culturally appropriate in that country. If you did that in Saudi Arabia or if that content was happening in Saudi Arabia, someone could be really harmed by that, right? And so you need to figure out, like, how do we make this fit for purpose? And so that’s just a really challenging ethical question of, like, how far down the line for our recommendations can we go to make sure that it really doesn’t cause unintended consequences or unintended harm in any way? And I think social media is the perfect example of where those tensions can really lie.

But your question around, kind of, you do a good thing over here and then maybe not so good thing over here, and it doesn’t balance out one thing that I’M constantly impressed about with the kind of founding fathers and mothers of the human rights framework is that there’s, unlike an ethical framework, a positive human rights impact isn’t sufficient to say, well, it doesn’t matter that we have a negative impact. They don’t cancel each other out. It’s not a net benefit or a net negative. In the human rights framework, you cannot infringe on people’s rights, period.

If you infringe on one, you are undermining the rest of them. And it’s one reason why so many of the human rights are interconnected at the same time. The guiding principles that I mentioned at the beginning, this kind of voluntary framework the UN put out, is a process document, it’s not an outcomes document. So it’s this interesting tension of, you can’t infringe on human rights. We can all just agree on that, but not doing it is incredibly hard. Right. Like you are working with folks where you are sourcing a mineral from the DRC and there’s 10 middlemen in between you using it in your battery and someone getting it out of the ground. And so how do you put in place the steps to try and limit risk? And so this is where the framework is really helpful because it says, have a policy, have a North Star, make those values public so that you can be held accountable to them and then understand the risks. So you’ve made this public commitment. How can your product, how can your service, how can your value chain potentially impact people in ways that could be harmful? And then once you know that, do something about it. Right? You can’t just know the risk. You actually then have to change your policies, change your product, change your sourcing markets, whatever it may be, to minimize that harm as much as possible. And then you need to track and report on it. Right? Continually assess the degree to which your policies and processes are working or not. And if they’re not working, how do we tweak them? How do we work with communities or workers or end users to make sure that they are fit for purpose? And then the final one is if you or your company has been causing or contributing to harm, you need to make people as whole as possible, right? So you need to provide access to effective remedy and make sure that people are able to hopefully go back to the lives they were living before the harm occurred.

[00:27:34] Anna: I would like to ask a very basic question. In our work, I see the words process and outcome get confused, even though they’re very different.

And you said the human rights is a process document and not an outcome document. And I would love to hear your differentiation between the two.

[00:27:51] Chloe: Yeah, and let me just clarify. So the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which sets out what the human rights are, is not a process document. That’s a kind of a values document. These are rights that everybody is entitled to just by virtue of being born. But the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which is this framework that says business has a responsibility to respect human rights, and this is what that responsibility entails. What it does is it lays out a framework, it is prescriptive about what a company needs to do. Those five things that I mentioned, the policy, the due diligence kind of understanding what your risks are, integrating, etc. And so in doing that, it recognizes that there still may be harms. You could turn over every stone and there still may be a harm that’s happening. Or you’re operating in a market where the government just doesn’t care about human rights. But your presence in the market is good for people, but it will require that you’re doing business with folks who may not have those same values. And so you could take a telecommunications company, for example, right? Like operating in a conflict zone, having telecommunications is essential to people. Being able to connect with family, to access information, to access humanitarian aid, to be able to travel to safety. Right? Like it’s an essential service that is being provided. And yet that telecommunications company is likely getting a lot of pressure from the government to shut down the network or to share user data. And there may be times where they do have to shut down the network. Right. And that is a real harm that’s happening. And it may have come after doing all of these steps. And so then you think about that remediation category. So the way that I think about it is like the outcomes is everybody’s rights are respected.

Wouldn’t that be a wonderful world?

I hope that I work myself out of a job by the end of my life so that that is the case. But it’s a very big mountain to climb versus the process document. Can we get the steps in place to minimize this as much as possible, even if we can’t avoid it 100%?

[00:29:53] Anna: It’s the difference between outcomes being this holy grail dream that might be unreachable versus that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work toward it. So here’s how we’re going to work toward it.

[00:30:04] Chloe: Exactly.

[00:30:04] Anna: Love it. It makes me think of there’s a social enterprise called Ont Flow that puts period products in public spaces so you know the time where you’re flying on an airplane, you go, oh shit, I got my period and you have to pay for a tampon and who has quarters anymore? Or there is no products available. They believe that, like it’s the, the same as toilet paper. It should just be free and in public restrooms. Very cool. They had this moment where a company that went against their core values was asking to use their products and they were like, do we distribute to them?

[00:30:38] Chloe: Yeah.

[00:30:39] Anna: And then it came down to yeah, because the people who menstruate. Menstruate. And they menstruate in this company too. So yes, take our products.

So it made me think of that. Right. Where maybe the company that they were working with, now that’s one of their clients and customers.

A lot of the things they do they don’t agree with, but the people in there still get their periods and that’s their mission.

[00:31:03] Chloe: Yeah.

[00:31:03] Anna: Is that a fair, like kind of also story comparison?

[00:31:07] Janel: Yeah.

[00:31:07] Chloe: And I would say that what makes that kind of appropriate from a human rights framework is that they are trying to democratize access to a product that is good for people. Right. Like people, women need tampons, full stop, is not harmful. And that their provision of that product to this company whose values don’t align to them doesn’t advance that other company’s mission, whatever that may be. Right. So if they’re in a field where they’re trying to reduce access to, I don’t know if they’re trying to lobby against same sex marriage or to something like that. It doesn’t help them get there. Right. It doesn’t support them in making that mission. That they have a reality. It ensures that the folks that are working with them have access to this product that they need.

Yeah, I didn’t know that story. I will remember it. Like, thank you for sharing it.

[00:31:54] Janel: Hey, I have a question on my list that is steering the conversation a totally different direction. But I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you about this before our time is up here because I know that one of the areas that people come to you for these days is AI. How from your perspective, has AI started to shift the conversation around business ethics?

[00:32:13] Anna: Yeah.

[00:32:14] Chloe: Yeah. My gosh, the million dollar question this year everyone’s talking about it. A couple thoughts on that. The first thought is that we often get questions of, oh my God, this technology is so transformative. There’s nothing that can help us figure this out. Right. Like, it’s so new.

But the reality is, is that the risks that it creates, whether it’s job displacement. Whether it’s bias and discrimination in the model development, whether it is concerns about the ability for it to be misused in ways that could incite violence or limit people’s access to essential knowledge related to health or to voting, whatever it may be, these are all things that are protected under the human rights framework. Right. There’s a right to an adequate standard of living, which you won’t have if you can’t get a job or don’t have a social safety net. There’s a right to non discrimination, which speaks to the question about bias. There’s a right to access to information, which speaks to this question around the validity of information.

And so they’re the same issues, they’re just manifesting in different ways. And what is. So I think taking people back is manifesting at a scale that we’ve never seen before. And I say that even with social media, right. Like this is the next level of people being able to create content and spread content in ways that could be harmful and could be incredibly beneficial. Right. I really think AI is going to revolutionize the healthcare sector in ways that may mean that in our lifetime things that we did not think were curable will be curable. And that speaks to the right to health.

So it is one of those things where it’s just the scale feels scary to people. But I always like to say the framework is still here, it’s still relevant, we still think the same things matter. Right. So the guiding principles say you need a policy. What does that mean in the AI space? It means have a set of responsible AI principles.

What does it mean to you? Company X that is either developing or deploying or using AI to do that in a responsible way? Are you thinking about transparency? Are you thinking about bias and discrimination? Are you thinking about job loss? Are you thinking about all of these different things? Setting the values that will guide you in how you create and use AI? And then are you understanding the ways that your product could be misused? Are you understanding the ways that AI could be harmful? And then doing something about it, like changing your model, changing the training data, doing something that limits the way that a product could be used? Right. And then are you continually tracking? Are you making sure that it’s working? Are you publicizing or being transparent about what those issues are and the risks are and how you’ve tried to mitigate them? And then if harm occurs, are you remediating it? Right. So it’s very clear to me that this is kind of an apples to apples thing. Even though the scale is much bigger in a dramatically big way. So, yes, it’s changing the conversation because people are like, oh, my gosh, this is so big, and this is so huge, and do we know what to do? And this has never been around before. And so we’re lost.

And I want to keep saying, we’re not lost.

We’ve got the framework, we’ve got the guidance. We just need to make it fit for purpose in this use case.

[00:35:18] Anna: This is my most favorite take I’ve ever heard on AI. I’m honestly so tired of this conversation.

And I feel. I feel invigorated from that response of like, this is it, this. And I think this is why I’m so tired of the conversation. Where it is apples to apples, it’s simply a new tool and everyone is freaking out about it.

[00:35:36] Chloe: And that speaks to the incentives point that we were saying earlier. I mean, one challenge with the AI space right now is that everyone is just incentivized to get, like, minimum by product out on the market.

A lot of these companies are really small, right? Like, we think, of course, about OpenAI and it’s this behemoth, but a lot of AI companies are really small. There’s a few people there, and they don’t have the resources and they don’t have the experts that are thinking about these things. It speaks to one of the points I was making earlier around the big guys. The big companies really should be thinking about how do we raise the boat for everyone? How do we provide tools and resources and education and capacity building for folks that are in our ecosystem that don’t necessarily have the resources that we have?

I know we’re coming up.

[00:36:18] Janel: I was gonna segue.

[00:36:19] Chloe: Let me segue now.

[00:36:24] Janel: I’m gonna make it sound really natural as we kind of look forward towards that future. What is giving you hope about where business is headed?

[00:36:33] Chloe: Yeah, I would say, I have to be very honest. It has been a turbulent year in the business and human rights space. What’s giving me hope is that the folks that I work with, the clients that I talk to every single day, remain as committed as ever.

And they’re still trying to figure out, okay, maybe the way that I was talking about it in 2024 is no longer working in 2025. And so 2026 is about telling that story in a different way. But it’s still the same story. It’s still the same call to action. It’s still the same request. It’s just, let’s package it in a way that’s going to resonate for this new time.

So I’m constantly inspired and proud to get to work with all these folks that are inside fighting the good fight, really working to make sure that the companies that they’re involved with are going to be beneficial for people. Which is at the end of the day, what we all want. We want to buy products from those companies, we want to work with those companies, partner with them. So these folks are really doing it every day, waking up and making it happen. And then the second thing that gives me hope are all those folks that are outside of the company that are saying, hey, hear me. This is what I’m seeing. This is what I’m experiencing. And sometimes speaking up is incredibly dangerous for them and they still do it. And those people have my undying respect. And yeah, I’m constantly inspired by what they are willing to do and say in order to try and make their lives better and the lives of their communities better.

[00:37:55] Anna: I unfortunately have to wrap.

I would love to chat with you for hours at this point.

Is there anything that you would like to direct people to who are listening? If they want to learn more about you, learn More about Article 1, start engaging in this work more.

[00:38:12] Chloe: Yeah, I mean everyone’s more than welcome to go to our website, which is article1advisors.com where we have some case studies on the types of work that we do and an overview of the different services that we provide.

Then there’s a lot of really good resources on organization called the Business and Human Rights Resource page. So they compile every single topic that speaks to the intersection of business and human rights. When they hear about something, they’ll reach out to the company to get a comment. Everything’s on their website. So they’re just an amazing resource. If you have any questions about the business and human rights space, everything is on their website. So yeah, love to point you in the direction of both of those.

[00:38:49] Anna: Amazing. Well thank you so much. This has been an invigorating conversation.

[00:38:56] Chloe: This is great.

[00:38:59] Janel: Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a strategic messaging co op for businesses who care loudly. From websites to onboarding flows, launches to long term strategies.

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