Artificial Intelligence Ethics and Responsible Technology Adoption in Organizations

Even as organizations are turning to artificial intelligence to find ways to work more efficiently not keeping pace with the changes in the governance that will be necessary to do so responsibly. This paper explores the connection between AI ethics governance practices and responsible technology adoption, based on an analytical sample of 120 organizations from financial services, healthcare, technology, and the public sector. Eight of these governance practices were rated for depth of implementation and were aggregated to create a governance maturity index, which was then correlated with a composite responsible adoption index, commitment to leadership, and ethics Awareness among employees. Results indicate that practices related to data protection and risk assessment are most embedded (3.83 and 3.48 on a scale of 1–5 for extent of embedding, respectively), while transparency, fairness auditing, and stakeholder engagement are only partially embedded (2.88, 2.78, and 2.51, respectively). Governance maturity is highly correlated with responsible adoption (r = 0.72), and leadership commitment and employee awareness are important in the relationship beyond the relationship with maturity (R² = 0.62). The results suggest that there is a practice-to-outcome gap, which is greatest in smaller companies and in the public sector, and the paper ends with recommendations for future priorities and research directions.