As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption.
What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents?
Arlington Research explored the answer to this question by surveying 850 executives and business decision-makers who were responsible for sponsoring, designing, and/or running AI initiatives in organizations with over 1,000 employees.
When it comes to agentic AI, trust has many dimensions, but this research uncovered a powerful overarching theme: The most critical trust gaps relate to data, and these are gaps that can be overcome by adding the right capabilities to any existing data infrastructure; no rip-and-replace required.
In this post, I'll focus on three:
1. The data freshness gap. AI agents need access to live data across myriad data sources.
2. The data relevance gap. AI agents need access to the right data for the given context, from authoritative sources.
3. The guardrail gap. AI agents need guardrails that effectively limit what they can "see" and do, continually enforced.
The Data Freshness Gap
AI agents are being enlisted for demanding operational use cases such as dynamically re-routing shipments, mitigating fraud in real time, and balancing the load on smart grids in response to changing conditions. They need access to live data because yesterday's report is already out-of-synch with the current moment, and that's the moment in which agents need to operate.
The research confirms this, reporting that 66% of organizations say that AI data must be real-time or near real-time to be trustworthy. Unfortunately, many organizations are set up for analytics, not operational decision-making; their data management infrastructures are just not built to support the live data requirements of today's agentic AI use cases.
The Data Relevance Gap
More dramatically, AI agents are not trusted when they leverage the wrong data to support a given task. The research indicates that the average company draws data from over 400 sources for AI initiatives, and almost 20% draw from over a thousand. Organizations need to prepare their AI agents so that they can effectively choose the right one for each individual context. However, the research found that 63% of organizations struggle to identify and prepare trustworthy data for AI. This requires a properly configured semantic layer between the AI and the sources, but this hasn't been easy for many organizations to establish.
The Guardrail Gap
Finally, AI agents need to act within clear boundaries that define what data they can see and what actions they are allowed to perform. If organizations can ensure that their AI agents can be trusted to adhere to such boundaries, they can enjoy high adoption rates. Unfortunately, the research shows that 67% of the surveyed organizations struggle with AI data security and access controls, representing a wide trust gap.
It is relatively straightforward to enable strong data governance policies for a single data source, but the complexity rises considerably when the number of data sources increases, and the complexity compounds when the sources are heterogeneous and span on-premises and cloud systems.
Closing the Gaps
Fortunately, each of these trust gaps can be decisively closed by leveraging a logical data management layer alongside any existing data infrastructure. In contrast with traditional data management platforms, logical layers enable:
1. Live access to disparate data, without requiring replication
2. Universal semantics, providing a shared understanding of data across systems
3. Strong data governance and security protocols across diverse sources enforced at the point of access, for reliable agentic AI guardrails