Risk researchers are in demand as companies try to make AI safer

Whether because of its legacy as a sci-fi villain or bad press around its more unsavory uses, people seem to generally distrust AI, survey after survey has shown.

That could pose problems as businesses continue to chase the hype around generative AI. A new Deloitte survey of 100 C-suite execs aimed at gauging the steps companies are taking to help make the AI they implement more trustworthy, from adding new business-wide processes to hiring for new roles and educating existing employees.

Among the findings:

• “Chief AI ethics officer” might look good on a press release, but more companies seem to be currently interested in hiring trust experts below that level. A little over half of those surveyed said they were planning to bring on AI ethics researchers, compliance specialists, and technology policy analysts, while fewer are hiring for exec-level roles.
• Around 49% of those surveyed said their companies have guidelines in place around ethical use of AI, while 37% plan to roll them out soon. Decisions behind these rules tend to go all the way to the top—around 52% of respondents said that their boards of directors are “always involved in creating policies and guidelines for the ethical use of AI.”
• Around 45% of respondents said their businesses are currently training or reskilling employees on the use of AI, and 44% are hiring for AI roles.

When asked whether negative public attention around AI risks or impending regulation aimed at the tech were driving these trends, Beena Ammanath, Deloitte’s global and US technology trust ethics leader and author of the book Trustworthy AI, told us she thinks it’s “a combination of both.”

Ammanath said the race to harness generative AI has woken up a lot of business leaders to safety issues of the technology, but many are still working on identifying the risks.

“We are still learning and evolving,” Ammanath said. “That’s why you will see the need for ethics researchers—the need for having more of that hands-on kind of role.”

As government actions like the European Union’s AI Act and President Biden’s sweeping executive order on the tech continue to roll out, the demand for jobs in this super-specialized field is likely to continue growing, according to Ammanath. She said she even suggested possibly augmenting a data science degree with a public policy minor to her college-aged son.

“Demand for the intersection of domain knowledge, AI, and policy—that is going to be [one of] those unicorn jobs that we might expect in the future,” Ammanath said.