AI still has a major trust problem
But something is happening here
And you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones
~ Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man
This week, OpenAI and Meta released competing versions of a new kind of persistent agent for business. To work well, each needs sweeping access to your company's data. And that's the rub, isn't it?
Both companies have a major credibility problem. The more sophisticated these tools become, the more access they require. The question is whether individuals and businesses are willing to hand that level of control over to companies that have done little, so far to show they deserve it.
If this software is going to be an integral part of businesses, big and small, they have to be able to trust it to be safe, secure and reliable. And right now, the entire industry has failed to make the case, and that's true on so many levels.
Trust is a tough thing to come by these days
I spent last week at the HumanX conference in Amsterdam, where I moderated three panels and heard the European perspective on AI. One message came through clearly: regardless of what the AI labs say or do, businesses need guardrails and security before they can trust AI tools enough to deploy them widely.
Stefan Weitz, HumanX co-founder and CEO, speaking at the event’s opening keynote went so far as to say that without governance, you’ll never get out of the pilot phase (which could explain why so many companies are stuck there).
"AI without governance is simply a toy. If there's no governance in your AI strategy, what you have is not a strategy, it's a pilot,” Weitz said. “And it will never scale because you don't know how you did it, you do not know why you did it, and you don't know who's responsible when it goes wrong."
Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of agentic AI at AWS, also speaking at HumanX, said we tend to skip governance because it's unglamorous, and want to rush to the glory of the final result, but that’s exactly what can trip us up. “We skip verification because it slows us down, and we actually skip governance because it's not as exciting as the next feature. This is exactly what's happening with AI too,” he said.
He's right of course, in spite of knowing better, companies (and individuals) sometimes skip over the boring parts, but governance is a key ingredient to AI success. "The question is whether you have the rigor and the discipline to go execute it," he said.
To get there though requires trusting the software and the companies that built it, and there's a real gap there right now. AI projects need guardrails to ensure they are doing the job you built them to do. Without them, projects will flounder, and you may find yourself, like the AI labs, admitting to harm you never intended and could have prevented with the right safeguards in place.
~Ron
