Member Article

How to overcome the distrust in AI holding businesses back in 2023

Success in business is like a game of chess, the best business leaders are always working several steps ahead, with a full view of the board. Adopting the latest technologies is one of the surest ways to keep ahead of market changes, and in recent years, one particular technology has seen more popular interest than any other: artificial intelligence (AI).

In fact, a recent global survey of senior IT and data science professionals conducted by Vanson Bourne found that 86 percent of organisations see AI as the future and a competitive differentiator. Deloitte warned back in 2020 that the “window for artificial intelligence competitive advantage was closing” – in 2023, it’s crunch time for organisations that are determined about their AI strategies.

But just how serious are organisations? The same survey revealed that 55 percent of respondents have only begun using AI in the last six months. Even more surprisingly, the vast majority of them wouldn’t trust the AI enough to forego human decision-making. So, what’s at the root of this untimely dissonance and what can be done to reconnect organisations with their AI ambitions?

Empower your data professionals with powerful data

Organisations are implementing general-purpose AI programmes to improve day-to-day business decision-making and automate processes which would otherwise constitute a colossal burden for their data teams. However, before they can reach this level of AI maturity, they must first take care of automation elsewhere in the organisation – namely, in their data pipelines, where business-critical data ingestion, pre-processing and transformation processes take place to make raw data analysis-ready.

When asked which step of the AI workflow process businesses would automate to make it more effective, the choice overwhelmingly fell to these early data pipeline processes. Yet, the reality is that nine in 10 organisations still manually execute these tasks, burning through vast resources and creating huge delays further downstream – so much so, that data often becomes stale and unusable by the time it reaches the hands of the data scientists. In fact, the manual process is so arduous that, in the UK, data scientists spend 77 percent of their time on basic data preparation, as opposed to their core function of building and training AI programmes.

Businesses that are not capitalising on the time and knowledge of their data scientists are missing a trick. With manual data processes constituting one of the biggest barriers to AI adoption, organisations would do well to support their staff by giving them easy access to timely, clean and accurate data at all times. As such, automation should feature atop business priorities in 2023.

Improve stakeholders’ understanding of the value of AI

Organisations gather vast amounts of data, which, when analysed at-scale, can uncover patterns in customer relationships, product usage and operational bottlenecks. Decision-makers need these insights to pinpoint key trends and areas for growth, so it’s vital that they can trust the data. Unfortunately, this is not the case for most organisations, which has a direct impact on their trust in AI, too. In the AI survey, 86 percent of respondents claimed they would struggle to trust AI to make all business decisions, because of ongoing concerns around underperforming AI models built using inaccurate or low-quality data.

This lack of trust makes it harder to achieve buy-in from stakeholders who control budgets and strategy. What’s more, when stakeholders aren’t onboard, AI programmes will not get the attention and investment they need to deliver tangible business results. The impact of underperforming AI programmes then costs organisations dearly – as much as five percent of their global annual revenue.

Breaking out of this vicious circle of distrust can be one of the most powerful actions businesses can take in 2023. They can do this by educating key stakeholders on how AI makes decisions, where automation can free up data talent and where this talent is best put to use – for example, in improving data quality and the performance of AI models. The more seamlessly humans work with AI programmes, the stronger the business case becomes for stakeholders to trust AI-led decisions.

Make data the fuel of business transformation in 2023 and beyond

All too often, businesses already have exactly the data they need to supercharge decision-making and carve out a competitive edge – they are just struggling to utilise it, and the consequence is costly. Businesses that have their eyes set on AI will have a long way to go to utilise it in its truest form, but they can make 2023 the year they build the right foundations for it.

The good news is that once the organisation’s tech stack, processes and culture are geared towards making the most of data, the payback is far greater than the uptick in AI performance. Those that have an accurate picture of what happened in the organisation yesterday, what’s happening right now and what to expect tomorrow, will always win the race to the customer and stay ahead of the curve.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by P Adams .