Overcoming the C-Suite's Distrust of AI

Despite rising investments in artificial intelligence (AI) by today's enterprises, trust in the insights delivered by AI can be a hit or a miss with the C-suite. Are executives just resisting a new, unknown, and still unproven technology, or their hesitancy is rooted in something deeper? Executives have long resisted data analytics for higher-level decision-making, and have always preferred to rely on gut-level decision-making based on field experience to AI-assisted decisions. AI has been adopted widely for tactical, lower-level decision-making in many industries -- credit scoring, upselling recommendations, chatbots, or managing machine performance are examples where it is being successfully deployed. However, its mettle has yet to be proven for higher-level strategic decisions -- such as recasting product lines, changing corporate strategies, re-allocating human resources across functions, or establishing relationships with new partners.