AI is infiltrating our personal lives and the workplace, and soon will be everywhere and irreplaceable in everything you do. At home and in the workplace. Developing and cultivating an AI Mindset will become a must for the modern knowledge worker. In a series of short blogs, I will explore core elements of an AI mindset. In this blog, Trust.

Granting Trust to AI

Within seconds of meeting someone new, we unconsciously identify if we can trust this person. When meeting a new AI, do you trust it? You did so for Netflix or Siri, right?

Trust has two sides of the fence. We either start with granting trust to someone and see if our gutfeel gets confirmed, or we start with distrust in the believe the person needs to earn our trust, through proven behaviours or capability. Whatever side of the fence we start, when trust is broken, it is very had to fix.

When it comes to AI in the workplace, most (55%) of people are comfortable with the use of AI at work to augment and automate tasks and inform managerial decision-making. This still leaves many who might start on the distrust side of the fence. This is understandable, as we might fear for our job. We want transparency and explainability from the AI, and know it is safely and ethically used, before granting it trust.

Smart AI Trust

You use ‘smart trust’. You tell your deepest feelings or secrets to a selected few close to you. You trust colleagues to get certain work done with only few instructions. You don’t trust every colleague to present your quarterly business update to the board.

You trust your spam filter and Siri. You can trust ChatGPT to give you some decent advice, ideas or perform some tedious tasks for you. You don’t trust it to decide if you should buy a house, make an impact full business decision, or an ethical choice.

The AI mindset grants trust to the AI and uses smart trust. Your trust in AI will speed up everything and will outperform a non-trusting AI relationship. Lack of smart trust in AI will slow you down, your learning, your performance, your job prospects, the business you work in.

The AI-mindset

The AI mindset starts working with AI out of curiosity, guides it, learns with it and only then checks if the AI calculations or ‘behaviours’ can be explained, and trust is maintained. The AI mindset expects some breaches of trust that need to be rectified but will treat it like something to mend and improve, rather than a broken relationship that can’t be fixed.

Smart Trust in AI is an important feat of the modern knowledge worker.