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As a successor to last year’s ethical technology report, this year we followed a similarly structured approach to gather insights. The report’s findings were the product of a survey of 1,716 business and technical professionals actively involved in either developing, managing, or consuming emerging technologies. The report is also supported by insights from qualitative interviews with 17 industry experts and 9 leaders from Deloitte’s Technology Trust Ethics (TTE) steering committee.

Our findings identified consistent themes and sentiments about the need and benefit for organizations to design and adopt ethical tech principles.

1

Organizations should develop trustworthy and ethical principles for emerging technologies, as reinforced by the impacts of Generative AI in the past year.

2

Organizations should design and apply tailored ethical principles specific to each of their technological products.

3

Organizations should proactively embed trustworthy and ethical principles as part of a team-based collaborative development process for emerging technologies.

4

Organizations should actively seek to collaborate with other businesses, government agencies, and industry leaders to create uniform, ethically robust regulations for emerging technologies.

5

Organizations who design and earnestly adopt trustworthy and ethical principles should benefit from mitigating reputational and financial damage and reinforcing trust in employees and stakeholders.

Explore key findings and metrics

This year’s developments in Generative AI have made clearer than ever the need for senior leadership to prioritize ethics in their company

Executives recognize cognitive technologies like Generative AI have the most potential for social good (39%) as well as the most potential for serious ethical risk (57%).
74% of companies are testing Generative AI technologies, and 65% are already using them internally.
The top two concerns for leaders regarding fallout from potential ethical missteps are reputational damage (38%) and human damage (27%).
Of companies with workers displaced by technology, most are moved to different roles and retrained or upskilled.

Executives support implementing ethical standards as part of the development process for emerging technologies

Most executives (72%) have defined specific ethical principles for cognitive technologies like Generative AI.
Responsibility (21%), safety/security (19%), and accountability (11%) ranked among leaders as the three most important ethical principles in emerging technologies.
56% of companies use a review board or process to review ethical standards for existing and new technologies.
68% of survey respondents say leadership encourages and praises flagging ethical concerns.

Executives want to collaboratively work with other businesses and government toward ethically robust regulation of emerging technologies

69% of executives believe the federal government should collaborate with businesses to define ethical standards for technology.
27% of companies currently collaborate with other businesses, and 23% collaborate with government organizations to review potential ethics concerns.

Exploring ethical principles

Use the interactive tool to learn how respondents prioritized the dimensions of trustworthy and ethical tech. Compare what respondents said in 2022 versus 2023 and their importance to an organization versus an individual.

Ethical principles' importance to the organization vs individual (2022 vs 2023)

Organization 2022

Organization 2023

Individual 2022

Individual 2023

Hey chatbot, what’s going on with Generative AI?

Despite the relative nascence of Generative AI in the marketplace, most companies surveyed are already testing or using Generative AI tools:

For all the buzz about Generative AI’s potential for productivity and profit, respondents expressed trepidation about its potential downsides. Survey respondents indicated the following as their most pressing concerns for Generative AI:

Bringing Gen Z on board

Results varied among different generations when survey respondents were asked, “Do you buy into the messaging about ethical standards that gets shared by leadership?”

Percentage of respondents who buy into their leadership’s messaging for ethical standards

Millennial and Gen Z respondents are less likely to trust messages about ethics broadcasted from the top down. As young professionals enter more positions of leadership in the next five to ten years, companies might begin preparing future business leaders with the knowledge and skills to create and follow ethical principles. Given their increased concern about ethical issues, including their voices now could better facilitate companies’ long-term ethical strength.

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