The fastest way to destroy trust in AI is to give it the wrong job

You will almost certainly have heard many business and technology leaders extolling the virtue of AI.

They will enthusiastically tell you that the technology will have a transformative impact on businesses across the globe.

I think they are right.

However, with two important caveats: AI must be given the right jobs, and the people using it must trust what it does.

Too often, AI is deployed across a business without much thought, as overconfident bosses assign agents tasks it isn't designed for.

The problem this creates is that many employees using AI tools every day are not yet prepared for their new role in managing these agents.

Trust only comes from experience and that builds over time.

When an AI system provides you with results that make sense and actually helps with your work, people start to feel more confident in using it.

But if it makes a mistake, that confidence can be lost in an instant.

If things go wrong, employees start finding ways around AI or stop using it altogether, and when leaders ignore employee concerns about making AI work better, its benefits are undermined.

The best way to ensure that AI delivers the efficiencies it promises is to ensure that it is doing the right job, and this isn't as straightforward as it sounds.

The areas where AI excels AI works on probabilities, producing answers that are likely to be right.

The key word here is ‘likely', which is why it occasionally hallucinates.

Being probabilistic makes AI very effective when dealing with unclear or complicated information.