Consumer Comfort With AI Growing, Accenture Finds

People are getting more comfortable using artificial intelligence (AI) to get things done, according to new data from professional services company Accenture.

The survey of more than 6,000 people in the United States, UK, Australia, France, Germany and Singapore found that 45% were more comfortable using AI today than they were a year ago. However, 43% said their comfort level with AI was unchanged from a year ago, and 12% said they were less comfortable using AI now than they were a year ago.

“As new digital services are playing an ever-larger role in everyday affairs, citizens expect government to keep pace with opportunities to leverage AI to improve public programs and services,” said Carl Ward, who leads AI programs for Accenture’s Health & Public Service practice. “AI is bringing new opportunities for human-machine collaboration to improve services, and government should be proactively exploring such new approaches to service delivery while ensuring AI is implemented responsibly.”

Respondents Question Ethical, Responsible AI Use

Accenture also found that 62% of respondents thought government was at least as qualified as the private sector when it came to delivering AI-enabled services. More than half (56%) said they supported the government’s use of AI to deliver or improve services. A quarter of the respondents said they were concerned about the government’s ethical and responsible use of AI.

United States respondents the most skeptical of the government’s use of AI, according to the data. Just 24% of those respondents said they were confident in the government’s ability to use AI responsibly and ethically, compared to 48% of respondents in France, 46% in Singapore, 45% in Germany, 42% in the UK and 32% in Australia.

Public-sector employees also tended to be more positive toward AI. According to the data, 67% of public-sector employees supported government use of AI, compared with 52% of other respondents. Public-sector employees were also more likely to be more comfortable with AI today than they were a year ago.

“AI and other digital advances are tools to help create better-functioning, more efficient, consistent and personalized services relevant to citizens’ circumstances, goals shared by many government organizations,” Ward said. “We found regular citizens as well as public workers reasonably supportive of government use of AI, and that should boost leaders’ and managers’ intent on keeping up with opportunities to transform public services. AI complements and enables the shift of government towards citizen-focused platform services, creating new ways of providing service beyond just automating existing interactions.”

Credit Unions Adding AI

Artificial intelligence is a growing influence in the credit union industry as more financial institutions turn to the technology to improve customer satisfaction, efficiency and fraud mitigation. AI is also a key component of robotic process automation (RPA) — ready-to-use smart automation centering on software robots or AI tools. Some credit unions currently use AI for compromised account management system alerts, post-conversion data cleanup and automating interactions among different technology platforms, according to Orlando, Fla.-based EnableSoft.

Technology analysis firm HFS Research has predicted that RPA will grow from an estimated $629 million market this year to $1.2 billion in 2021.