“Psychological safety is essential in this new era of AI,” says Rafi Tarafdar, executive vice president and chief technology officer, Infosys. “The technology itself is evolving so fast – companies have to experiment, and some things will fail. There needs to be a safety net.”
To learn how psychological safety impacts success with enterprise-level AI, MIT Technology Review Insights conducted a survey of 500 business leaders. The findings reveal high self-reported levels of psychological safety, but also show that fear still persists. Anecdotally, industry experts highlight one reason for the gap between rhetoric and reality: While organizations may publicly promote safe-to-use messages, deep cultural undercurrents may counter that intention.
Building psychological safety requires a coordinated, systems-level approach, and human resources (HR) alone cannot deliver such change. Instead, enterprises should deeply integrate psychological safety into their collaboration processes.
Key findings of this report include:
- Companies with experimentation-friendly cultures have more success in AI projects. The majority of executives surveyed (83%) believe that a company culture that prioritizes psychological safety significantly improves the success of AI initiatives. Four out of five leaders agree that organizations that promote such safety are more successful in adopting AI, and 84% see a connection between psychological safety and tangible AI outcomes.
- Psychological barriers are proving to be greater obstacles than technical challenges to enterprise AI adoption. Encouragingly, nearly three-quarters (73%) of respondents indicated that they feel safe to provide honest feedback and freely express opinions in their workplace. Still, a significant portion (22%) admit that they are hesitant to lead an AI project because they could be blamed if it fails.
- Achieving psychological safety is a moving target for many organizations. Less than half of leaders (39%) consider their organization’s current level of psychological safety to be “very high.” Another 48% reported a “moderate” degree of it. This may mean that some enterprises are attempting to adopt AI on a cultural foundation that is not yet fully stable.
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by the editorial staff of MIT Technology Review. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes writing surveys and collecting data for the surveys. The AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that underwent thorough human review.
