Artificial Intelligence and blockchain: The new power couple

Even so, it’s hard to ignore the gigantic legal elephant in the room. Because AI learns by scraping all available data—including yours and, potentially, that of your competitors—how can you protect your intellectual property (IP) and avoid the unwitting infringement of IP that others own?

That answer is still unknown, which is why 92 percent of leaders we surveyed think generative AI implementation is a moderate- to high-risk endeavor.

However, one solution may be emerging—ironically enough, from another widely hyped, often misunderstood technology. Allow us to reintroduce you to blockchain.

In many ways, blockchain is generative AI’s ideal technology complement—the grounding rod for AI’s lightning. But, much like AI itself, blockchain is not some silver bullet that, on its own, will unleash AI innovations. The “tech” certainly matters, sure, but so too do the “people” and “process” components.

The work to do ahead is significant. Organizations must adopt and enforce a responsible AI framework—an approach to designing, building, and deploying AI systems in a safe, trustworthy, and ethical manner that will need to include all parts of that people-process-technology equation. That means, for example, ensuring data integrity, statistical validity, and the accuracy of the predicative models—three top concerns cited by executives in our recent “2023 KPMG US AI Risk Survey Report .”

And there’s still much work to be done on that front, as we note in the report, with some apparent gaps in expectations. In one example, somewhat surprisingly, 82 percent of respondents in our AI risk survey said their company had a clear definition of AI and full understanding of their predictive models—except that many of the companies surveyed are also using “blackbox” solutions developed by third parties that simply don’t offer that optimistic level of transparency.