Yahoo Finance AI is stealing trust. Here’s how companies can win it back
Artificial intelligence. The name doesn’t exactly scream “trust,” right?
As a consumer, I’ve been conditioned to prize the real deal, the genuine article. To me, that feels at odds with generative AI, a technology infamous for making things up. But AI blunders like dressing people of color in Nazi uniforms are just one of many reasons to be distrustful.
Look, even the folks who build AI don’t know how it works. It promotes harmful stereotypes, and its very creators fret about AI-induced human extinction.
No wonder almost eight out of 10 Americans don’t trust businesses to use AI responsibly. For bosses as well as workers, an AI trust gap persists too.
For brand trust, AI introduces a whole new risk category, says Beena Ammanath, leader of trustworthy AI and technology trust ethics with Deloitte. But the biggest risk is not using AI, Ammanath warns. “If you don’t use it, you’re going to lose your competitive advantage.”
So, where to start building trust? Philipp Herzig, chief AI officer of software giant SAP, tells customers using AI to begin by thinking about their core beliefs and what’s important to them. “The technology moves super fast,” says Herzig, whose company released a comprehensive AI ethics policy back in 2018. “But values shouldn’t move fast.”
Living those values means giving people the final say. “AI is a very, very useful tool,” Herzig says. “But at the end of the day, as it relates to decision-making, it needs to be done by a human.”
For oversight, SAP has an AI ethics governance body. At one point, the company considered adding an AI feature to its SuccessFactors HR solution that would let users generate questions for job interviews, partly based on a candidate’s CV. But its AI ethics group decided that even after removing personally identifiable information (PII), the data privacy risk of using CVs was too high.
Deloitte identifies six dimensions of trustworthy generative AI. It should be fair and impartial, transparent and explainable, safe and secure, accountable, responsible, and respectful of privacy. Tall order.
Making AI transparent and explainable calls for strong communication, both inside and outside the company. First, ensure everyone on the team knows enough about AI to ask the right questions and flag potential problems, Ammanath says. “Building that base-level AI literacy for your employees is something that I’m seeing happening across enterprises today.”
Second, be straight with the public. For instance, a company should clearly label AI-generated content, or disclose in plain English how it uses the data gathered by its AI customer support system. “It’s no longer about just putting out legal [or] really complex documents but explaining it in a language that your customer can understand,” Ammanath explains.
A business must also define “who is accountable when AI produces inaccurate results, or when it goes racist or misogynistic,” says the author of Trustworthy AI: A Business Guide for Navigating Trust and Ethics in AI.
As AI advances and evolves, companies need to watch out for new “side effects” that could impact trust, Ammanath notes. “We are truly entering that phase of being agile, being nimble on adapting to these new technologies, along with the risks that come with it.”
Trust me, AI will keep us all guessing.
Nick Rockel
nick.rockel@consultant.fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
