AI is transforming the C-suite as executives race to find new ways to improve workflows and boost profits. But beyond operational efficiencies, business leaders are using the tech for big-picture guidance, and say they trust it more than their closest human counterparts.
Around 74% of executives are more confident in AI for business advice compared to colleagues or friends, according to new research by SAP, a data and software company. But these leaders are taking their faith in the bots even further—38% trust AI to make business decisions for them, and 44% defer to the technology’s reasoning over their own insights.
Part of that AI reverence is based on how much information that AI can analyze about a specific company, according to Jared Coyle, chief AI officer at SAP North America. “Systems in these large organizations are now so complex, so data-driven, that AI is as capable as the smartest people on the planet of parsing data and coming up with the key options,” he tells Fortune. “Executives trust the input of a friend and a colleague, but the friend and the colleague didn’t just parse 2 billion pieces of information available to them.”
To be sure, the most common areas where executives are turning to AI are data analysis, creating projections and forecasts, and spotting risks or problems they hadn’t previously recognized. Perhaps most importantly, though, 64% of leaders have fully integrated, or are continuing to integrate, generative AI into executive decision making.
“It’s not just the base quantitative insights. It’s the ability to inspire creativity and to come up with ideas that the leadership teams wouldn’t have otherwise come up with,” Coyle explains.
While AI offers leaders a multitude of benefits, the software isn’t foolproof. Generative AI models have the potential to hallucinate, producing incorrect or misleading information due to insufficient training and learning materials. Unlike humans, AI is not conscious and cannot think critically.
As leaders become more advanced, Coyle warns that while executives should continue to use AI to help with business matters, they must keep people in the decision-making processes to help them make complicated and high value strategic decisions.
“For key strategic decisions that have substantive business results, the rate of hallucinations has to be almost zero,” he says. “And so for those decisions, most leaders are going back to the trusted data set and the human is in the loop on those.”