Why Trust Matters as Higher Ed Adopts AI Tools
One of the major barriers to artificial intelligence adoption across industries is the idea of displacement. Will AI eventually be able to replace humans? Will automation render our skills — and our jobs — obsolete? Most of us understand that however powerful this technology might be, it still requires human oversight to ensure it’s working properly. The question now is how we can collaborate with this technology in ways that amplify the value of us both.
DISCOVER: Organizations are creating frictionless digital experiences for employees.
Trusting in Technology Is Key to Harnessing Its Potential
Trust plays a major role in these two parties working together. The people at the helm of technology must trust that the technology they’re implementing is going to help them make the right decisions. In campus dining services, AI-enabled systems are helping to guide human decision-making, providing consumption data for leaders to act on. That doesn’t work if the staff doesn’t see this technology as an operational partner.
In research labs, students are learning to work alongside robots, thanks to the help of virtual reality. The virtual environment adds a layer of safety, helping to build the trust these students have in working with these autonomous machines.
This idea of trust and technology extends to operations elsewhere in higher ed. Community college systems are increasingly centralizing their cybersecurity operations, trusting that the systems they’re putting in place are capable of protecting multiple institutions rather than a single campus. And university researchers are setting up technical systems that allow them to work with outside partners without compromising their research data. In both of these cases, this trust crosses traditional boundaries and requires a different level of oversight than IT leaders might be used to.
The institutions getting this right are the ones that treat the human side of the equation as seriously as the technical side. They've made building trust an explicit part of the work through governance structures and transparency.
