Fewer than half of Irish executives said they planned to give staff full access to generative artificial intelligence in the next three years, a new report has found, despite the growing popularity of the tools.
The finding, which was revealed in the annual Accenture Technology Vision report, found executives saw bridging the trust gap as a crucial step in the wider adoption of generative AI tools in the workplace.
The plans for rolling out generative AI was at odds with the expectation of 94 per cent of executives expecting to see the technology change the nature of their employees’ work over the same period.
Some 82 per cent believed prioritising a trust strategy is essential for successful AI integration, with 84 per cent believing the full potential of the technology cannot be realised without it. That compared to 77 per cent globally.
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Irish bosses also see employee support as a key part of successfully adopting the technology, with more than 80 per cent saying it was important to communicate their strategy to staff to build trust, and a similar amount viewing proactively building trust between customers and personified AI as crucial to its success.
That includes considering how employees engage with AI and feel comfortable with it, and rely on the outputs of the technology with confidence.
“It’s hard to unlock the value of generative AI, and how we build trust into organisations. Lots of organisations are using it and have dabbled into it. But how you scale it and bring it to an enterprise level Is going to be the challenge now. Everybody’s got used to talking about it and used to it being around, but how do we actually use it?” said Austin Boyle, head of technology at Accenture Ireland.
“I think it will happen much quicker than [three years], because what we’re seeing now is this rapid adoption of it, it is a maturity within enterprise. There has been over the last 12 months a real focus on Gen AI within organisations and where typically Ireland has lagged a little bit previously, the speed of this technology coming, it’s forcing organisations to really think about, how to engage with it.”
Only 33 per cent of Irish executives expect the use of AI agents to significantly rise in the three-year period, compared to 40 per cent globally. However, 95 per cent of Irish bosses said establishing or maintaining a consistent personality for customer-facing AI agents was crucial, while 83 per cent said creating unique chatbots was a challenge.
The report, which is now in its 25th year, took in data from 21 industries and 28 countries.
Among the trends that emerged from the survey were the impact on brands and how they engage with customers, the entry of large language models into the real world, and equipping staff with the ability to use these new tools and innovate as a result.
