“Psychological safety is a must in this new era of artificial intelligence,” says Rafi Tarafdar, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Infosys. “The technology itself moves so quickly – companies have to experiment and some things fail. There has to be a safety net.”
To assess how psychological safety influences success when using AI at the enterprise level, MIT Technology Review Insights conducted a survey of 500 business leaders. The results show high levels of self-reported psychological safety, but also suggest that fear still has a foothold. Ironically, industry experts point to the reason for the gap between rhetoric and reality: While organizations may publicly promote messages of safe experimentation, deeper cultural undertones may counteract this intention.
Creating psychological safety requires a coordinated system-level approach, and human resources (HR) alone cannot achieve this transformation. Instead, businesses must deeply embed psychological safety into their collaboration processes.
Key findings from this report include:
- Companies with cultures that favor experimentation have greater success with AI projects. The majority of executives surveyed (83%) believe that a company culture that prioritizes psychological safety significantly increases the success of AI initiatives. Four in five leaders agree that organizations that promote this safety are more successful in adopting AI, and 84% see a link between psychological safety and tangible AI outcomes.
- Psychological barriers are proving to be more significant obstacles to the adoption of AI in enterprises than technological issues. Encouragingly, nearly three-quarters (73%) of respondents indicated that they feel safe providing honest feedback and freely expressing opinions in their workplace. However, a significant portion (22%) admit they are hesitant to lead an AI project because they might be blamed if it fails.
- Achieving psychological safety is a moving target for many organizations. Less than half of executives (39%) rate their organization's current level of psychological safety as “very high.” Another 48% report a “moderate” degree of this disease. This may mean that some businesses are pursuing AI adoption on cultural grounds that are not yet fully stable.
This content was created by Insights, the content creation division of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by the editors of MIT Technology Review. It has been researched, developed and written by writers, editors, analysts and illustrators. This includes writing surveys and collecting survey data. The AI tools that could be used were limited to secondary manufacturing processes that had undergone extensive human testing.
