Security concerns slow AI adoption

PagerDuty has released a study that reveals technology executives at America’s largest companies are apprehensive about the adoption of generative AI, citing security and moral implications among their concerns. In fact, 98% have directed their teams to pause internal genAI initiatives while their company establishes guidelines and policies.

PagerDuty surveyed 100 Fortune 1000 executives who report directly to a CIO with a minimum seniority of VP. As organizations increasingly discuss the promise of AI, 100% of executives surveyed have concerns about the security risks of this technology and more than half (51%) believe they should adopt genAI only after they have the right guidelines in place.

Although these executives are closest to the potential business benefits and future of advanced technologies, nearly half (46%) believe they risk falling behind if they don’t adopt genAI as quickly as possible, regardless of parameters. However, a full quarter revealed that they do not trust genAI.

“Tech executives are usually early adopters eager to deploy advanced technologies, but only if they can do it safely and within a company’s prescribed guidelines. Our survey shows there’s hesitation to experiment with genAI until they can trust the results,” said Eric Johnson, chief information officer at PagerDuty. “Key to deploying genAI at scale is providing these organizations with the right technology and a solid foundation of trust that helps them experiment in a safer environment than what exists today,” he added.

Other key findings from the survey data include:

GenAI’s risk to the organization’s reputation concerns 50% of respondents.

Unease over copyright and legal exposure keeps a majority of them up at night (51%).

51% also believe they should adopt genAI only after they have the right guidelines in place.

Only 29% of companies have established formal guidelines. Additionally, 66% are currently setting up these policies.

Despite pausing genAI initiatives to establish policies at some point, 64% of executives responded that genAI is already being used in most or all of their organization’s departments and 98% of their companies are experimenting with use cases for genAI.

The survey was conducted by Wakefield Research on behalf of PagerDuty. All survey findings and methodology are available here.

While genAI offers significant potential for streamlining operations and enhancing innovation, recognizing these concerns and ensuring human oversight are crucial for its integration into organizational workflows. PagerDuty, the industry leader in AIOps, has been working with AI and machine learning for years and continues to grow its genAI platform to address the concerns of the tech leaders highlighted in this study.

“Driving operational transformation is our priority at PagerDuty, and this study shows there is work to be done within some of our country’s largest companies,” said Johnson. “We want to help companies use genAI with confidence and trust, to dig deeper and complete more complex tasks. With automation, you’re in a position to ‘roll back or fail forward’ as quickly as possible to minimize the impact for yourself and your customers.”