AI Adoption: Businesses Express Worry Over Trust, Ethics, Data Security

By Aduragbemi Omiyale

Though the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is growing by the day, business owners and organisations still nurse some resentment against it because of a few issues.

Research recently conducted by Salesforce showed that 77 per cent of business leaders interviewed cited nagging issues around trusted data and ethics that could grind their deployments to a halt.

However, nearly half of customer service teams, over two-fifths of salespeople, and a third of marketers say they’ve fully implemented AI to augment their work.

AI is‌ the most significant technology in generations, with one forecast projecting a net gain of more than $2 trillion in new business revenues by 2028 from Salesforce and its network of partners alone.

As enterprises across industries develop their AI strategies, leaders in customer-facing departments such as sales, service, and marketing are eager to use AI to drive internal efficiencies and revolutionise customer experiences, but a lack of trusted data could hamper AI ambitions because trust, data security, and transparency are at the heart of successful AI.

While the report found AI adoption rates are expected to climb dramatically, only 10 per cent of people today fully trust AI to help them make informed decisions, and 59 per cent of organisations said they lack the unified data strategies that boost AI’s reliability and accuracy.

According to the report, 74 percent of the general population is concerned about the unethical use of AI.

Companies that focus on end-user control are in the strongest position to build customer trust as they build their AI strategies, with 56 per cent of respondents to the same survey signalling their openness to AI under such circumstances.

“This is a pivotal moment for the world as business leaders across industries are looking to AI to unlock growth, efficiency, and customer loyalty,” Salesforce Director Solutions Engineering for Africa, Ms Linda Saunders, said.

“But success requires much more than an LLM. Enterprise deployments need trusted data, user access control, vector search, audit trails and citations, data masking, low-code builders, and seamless UI integration to succeed.

“Salesforce brings all of these pieces together with our Einstein 1 Platform, Data Cloud, Slack, and dozens of customisable, turnkey prompts and actions offered across our clouds,” she added.

“In an era where AI is increasingly woven into business tools, maintaining trust and clarity in communications is rising to the forefront of concerns. That’s why integrating an ai detector into your content workflow can help spot automated text and preserve both integrity and customer confidence,” it was stated further.

The Trends in AI for CRM report analysed statistics from several studies. They found companies worried they could miss out on the opportunities that generative AI presents if data underpinning large language models (LLMs) isn’t grounded in their trusted customer records.

At the same time, respondents expressed ongoing concerns about a lack of clear company policies to govern the ethical use of this innovation, as well as a complex vendor landscape of LLMs that prompted 80 per cent of enterprises to report they currently use multiple models.