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AI adoption stalls without trust
Trust blocks adoption
AI began spreading while most of the talk was about compute and recursive self-improvement, and most effort went into making the technology better. In the real economy, though, it gets blocked because people don't trust it to be used in their business and their daily lives, even when it is good enough.
Relationships come first
That is the organizing idea behind Beacon, which buys software businesses and builds a platform to get technology into the hands of the real economy faster. Customers only buy from people they know and trust, so the relationship comes first.
One of the largest private companies in the United States, in construction and manufacturing, is an end customer of a small software company Beacon bought. After some early interactions following the purchase, it asked Beacon whether it could solve AI for the company generally.
Why does good technology still get rejected?
Information systems researcher Fred Davis introduced the technology acceptance model in a 1989 paper in MIS Quarterly. It holds that people adopt a tool based on how useful and how easy to use they judge it to be. Later research added trust as a factor, especially where a tool handles money or personal data. The model has become one of the most cited in information systems research.
How did online shopping overcome distrust?
In the mid-1990s many people worried about typing a card number into a website. Netscape released SSL in 1995, which encrypted the connection and later appeared to users as a padlock in the browser. Amazon and eBay both launched that same year.
Why does trust matter when quality is hidden?
Economist George Akerlof argued in a 1970 paper about used cars that when buyers cannot judge quality, sellers of good products struggle to earn a fair price. Warranties, brands, and reputations arose partly to close that gap. Akerlof received the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics in 2001, sharing it with Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz, for work on markets with unequal information.
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