Firms Use Gen AI but Don’t Analyze the Risks

Business and tech leaders admit their organizations aren’t looking before they leap.

Fifty-eight percent of 1,000 CFOs and CIOs say they’ve yet to complete “a preliminary [emphasis ours] assessment of AI risks in their organization,” according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’s 2024 U.S. Responsible AI Survey.

Yet only 13% of respondents are still in the AI exploration mode. Nine percent are already using AI or generative AI (Gen AI) like ChatGPT in a limited capacity. Forty percent report say they’ve deployed AI in employee systems for operational tasks only and 38% are deploying it in both employee and customer systems!

Bottom line: A startling number of businesses are either unaware of, or just aren’t worried about, the risks of AI implementation:

• errors can spike when AI is asked to do more than it’s designed to
• data collection practices can impact customers’ privacy, and
• Gen AI can flat-out make up answers when stumped.

Gen AI Brings 5 Key Benefits Despite Risks

“While it’s still early days, leaders now have a better understanding of how AI affects business strategy,” notes the PwC survey. “They also are beginning to realize what it takes to build and deploy AI solutions that not only drive productivity and business transformation but also manage risk and preserve the incremental value that these solutions create.”

The execs surveyed by PwC reported five key benefits to their companies implementing AI and Gen AI:

• enhanced customer experience (reported by 41%)
• improved cybersecurity and risk management (40%)
• facilitated innovation facilitation (39%)
• improved transparency (37%), and
• facilitated coordinated management of AI in our organization (37%).

PricewaterhouseCoopers surveyed C-level execs from public and private companies in financial services (24%), health (21%), technology, media and telecommunications (17%), consumer markets (14%), industrial products (13%) and energy, utilities and mining (12%).