Lessons Learned
Reflections, reviews, and discussions about how emerging technologies shape workplace transformations.
A Trust Mandate
What is being done about the fact that AI is going to be able to perform an accountant’s job?
Like most emerging technologies, the rapid embrace of AI by corporations has tapped into a very common human emotion: fear. Humans tend to have fears surrounding new and emerging technologies, and the introduction of digital technologies has further enhanced this fear. As a society we tend to attribute this fear to digital technologies “rapid” rise and immediate impact on our jobs.
This question was dropped into the comments by one viewer during a short webinar, The Trust Advantage, members of KPMG’s AI and IT Enablement teams discussed the role of Trust in adopting AI and the pitfalls of failing to produce trust.
While the speakers did not directly respond to this question, their conversation about trust clearly related to questions and fears about the
use of AI. As a finance consulting firm, KPMG has to develop their use of AI to instill trust, because they are in an industry predicated on law, compliance, and ethical expertise. The financial industry since the 1990s has had to be extremely careful in their legal and ethical policies to prevent another Enron.
Interestingly, this panel focused largely on the technical and practical decision-making surrounding the use of a new technology.
But it didn’t address a glaring concern throughout the conversation: what is the role of humans and our human responses to new technologies like AI?
Contrary to what one participant said, trust is not a business outcome or output. Trust is a relationship forged through social
expectations, values, reciprocity, and most importantly, humans. Tools like
computer software are neither trustworthy nor untrustworthy until humans pick
it up, choose to use it, and from those choices, trust and trust relationships
emerge.
The speakers pointed out that trust is a very significant barrier to using new technologies (I believe one participant said that up to 80% of barriers to AI goals can be attributed to trust).
Trust Guardrails
According to this panel, trust occurs when a business sets specific and solid goals or outcomes to guide the adoption process.
Additionally, a business needs to develop clear policies, governance and compliance to prevent ethical and legal issues. These polciies take the role of guardrails to
guide how employees use the new technology.
The AI Fallacy
One fallacy that continues throughout all the discussions I have participated in is that AI is a radically different technology. It's not.
And more importantly, we are still humans having very human reactions to the
mysterious, concerning, and new. Our collective social reaction to AI resembles
all technology shifts. And trust is always a component of this reaction.
We have trouble trusting a new tool. We don’t know what it
does, we don’t know how it works, and there is a sense of mystery (and
therefore danger) to the new.
One way to combat this fear was touched on by the speakers in this webinar: we adapt better and begin to trust a situation when we have social and behavioral expectations we can correlate to the situation.
For example, we trust the bus driver to safely drive us to the next stop on her route. We may not know the bus driver. We may not know how their day is going. But we do have social and behavioral expectations which guide what we expect the bus driver to do. If the bus driver suddenly does something odd like turn down the wrong way on a one way street, the tentative trust frays.
When we encounter AI, a new(ish) technology, we do not know what social or behavioral expectations we can expect or that we expect it to follow. By putting in coherent and clear guidelines, a business can help employees gain trust not in AI but in the situation and circumstances in which
employees are choosing to use or not use AI.
Lessons to be Learned
So how do we set social expectations and guidelines for how relationships should work when we encounter a new situation?