“Psychological safety is mandatory on this latest era of AI,” says Rafee Tarafdar, executive vice chairman and chief technology officer at Infosys. “The tech itself is evolving so fast—firms must experiment, and a few things will fail. There must be a security net.”
To gauge how psychological safety influences success with enterprise-level AI, MIT Technology Review Insights conducted a survey of 500 business leaders. The findings reveal high self-reported levels of psychological safety, but in addition suggest that fear still has a foothold. Anecdotally, industry experts highlight a reason for the disconnect between rhetoric and reality: while organizations may promote a secure to experiment message publicly, deeper cultural undercurrents can counteract that intent.
Constructing psychological safety requires a coordinated, systems-level approach, and human resources (HR) alone cannot deliver such transformation. As an alternative, enterprises must deeply embed psychological safety into their collaboration processes.
Key findings for this report include:
- Corporations with experiment-friendly cultures have greater success with AI projects. Nearly all of executives surveyed (83%) consider an organization culture that prioritizes psychological safety measurably improves the success of AI initiatives. 4 in five leaders agree that organizations fostering such safety are more successful at adopting AI, and 84% have observed connections between psychological safety and tangible AI outcomes.
- Psychological barriers are proving to be greater obstacles to enterprise AI adoption than technological challenges. Encouragingly, nearly three-quarters (73%) of respondents indicated they feel secure to supply honest feedback and express opinions freely of their workplace. Still, a significant share (22%) admit they’ve hesitated to steer an AI project because they is perhaps blamed if it misfires.
- Achieving psychological safety is a moving goal for a lot of organizations. Fewer than half of leaders (39%) rate their organization’s current level of psychological safety as “very high.” One other 48%report a “moderate” degree of it. This may occasionally mean that some enterprises are pursuing AI adoption on cultural foundations that aren’t yet fully stable.
