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Business Times
16-07-2025
- Business
- Business Times
Four trust types that make or break AI projects
COMPANIES invest heavily in artificial intelligence (AI), yet as many as about 80 per cent of AI projects fail. Why? Natalia Vuori (one of this article's co-authors) and her colleagues discovered that success hinges not just on the technology, but on something not easily quantifiable: various forms of trust. In other words, what employees think and feel about AI's capability. This matters even in organisations with strong cultures of trust. The researchers conducted an in-depth study at TechCo, a Scandinavian software firm of about 600 employees implementing an AI-powered knowledge-mapping tool. This tool collected data from employees' digital activities to create a visual expertise map showing who knew what across the organisation. Through interviewing TechCo's managers and employees (on condition of anonymity) and analysing data on usage of the AI tool, the researchers uncovered four forms of trust among employees. Each form of trust leads to different behaviours that could directly impact the success or failure of AI initiatives in organisations. The study, now published in the Journal of Management Studies, also points to actions through which leaders can foster various forms of trust in AI. 1. Full trust: High cognitive and emotional trust Employees with full trust believed in the AI tool's capabilities (cognitive trust) while feeling comfortable with the technology (emotional trust). As one manager said: 'I perfectly understand the logic (behind the tool), if you improve the way you're harnessing the knowledge and insights of people, if you make it easier for people to find each other, that makes perfect sense.' A people-centric approach that acknowledges both thinking and feeling dimensions of trust is essential. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up These employees saw strategic applications beyond the tool's basic functions. One of them noted: 'You can observe who you're collaborating with, as well as who you're not collaborating with... you can consider your own conduct and determine what kind of individuals you need to work with.' Emotionally, these employees felt positive about AI: 'I think it's where the world is going, and for me... if I'm working now and I'm being paid, why shouldn't it be transparent?' Significantly, employees with full trust didn't change their digital behaviours, providing the AI with accurate data needed for optimal performance. 2. Uncomfortable trust: High cognitive trust and low emotional trust The second form of trust involved employees who recognised the tool's value but worried about its implications. One manager said: 'That's a wonderful idea that you would somehow be able to figure out who would be the best expert for this... But at the same time, just when you may have started with the positive potentials, you may not have noticed these negative potentials.' Many feared the potential misuse of data: 'There is always the worry that those data will be used for something else I don't have any control over... For example, against us. Now, it's focused on people, not from the management side. But I guess companies want to be more efficient, and – well, there's a fine line.' To handle this cognitive-emotional conflict, these employees began to be wary of their digital footprints. They limited the information visible to the AI by marking calendar events as private or using generic descriptions. 3. Blind trust: Low cognitive trust and high emotional trust Some employees questioned the AI tool's competence while still feeling comfortable with it. As one interviewee said: 'I sometimes feel like it is not tracking the amount of time I've spent on either technology properly.' Another said the map generated by the tool did not accurately reflect the expertise of some colleagues. 'It was hard to find the person with actual knowledge.' Despite these concerns, they didn't feel threatened by the technology: 'I am not concerned about sharing information because I know that the information... is information that generally could benefit other people to find as well.' Interestingly, these employees responded by detailing their digital footprints. They added more information to their calendars, project entries and online discussions to help improve the tool's performance. As one employee explained: 'Let's take a step forward and provide the necessary details to make our tool more efficient.' 4. Full distrust: Low cognitive and emotional trust Employees with full distrust neither believed in the tool's capabilities nor felt comfortable with it. They described negative experiences ('I tried using (the tool), and nothing worked at all') and questioned its fundamental approach ('We shouldn't trust only data or digital services to make decisions'). These employees also experienced negative emotions, particularly fear. One confided: 'I feel that it is dangerous. My fear is that it may be the misuse of data. They (the collected data) are used against you in some cases.' Their responses were the most damaging to the AI system – either withdrawing their data entirely ('I just opt out') or actively manipulating their digital footprints by using certain keywords to shape how they appeared in the system. These behaviours created a vicious circle. When employees withdrew, confined or manipulated their digital footprints, the AI received imbalanced or inaccurate data, decreasing its performance. As one interviewee noted: 'Some experts disappeared from the visual map.' Lower performance reduced trust further, leading to decreased usage until eventually, the project failed. How to make your AI initiative stick If there's one key insight from the study, it is that a people-centric approach that acknowledges both thinking and feeling dimensions of trust are essential. Trust is not just a monolithic, one-size-fits-all concept. For a start, leaders introducing an AI tool to the workplace should provide comprehensive training that explains how AI works, its capabilities and its limitations. Such efforts build cognitive trust. Leaders should also develop and communicate clear AI policies that define what data will be collected and how it will be used. This helps employees understand the tool's role, what it's capable of and, as importantly, how employees' concerns and personal protection will be addressed. When people feel at ease, they are more likely to form emotional trust. This brings us to the point of managing expectations about AI performance. Managers should encourage patience during early stages when results may be inconsistent. Celebrate AI-driven achievements or improvements to demonstrate progress and reinforce the value of the AI initiative. The study also shows that leaders must address feelings, not just facts. Share your own enthusiasm about AI's potential benefits. Create psychological safety by encouraging the open expression of concerns about AI. Address anxieties with empathy rather than dismissal. When employees feel their emotions are acknowledged, they're more likely to develop positive connections with new technologies. Remember: True AI transformation starts not with algorithms, but with a sophisticated understanding of various forms of trust and fostering them as part of your AI initiative. Quy Huy is the Solvay chaired professor of technological innovation and a professor of strategic management at Insead Natalia Vuori is an assistant professor at the department of industrial engineering and management of Aalto University This was first published in Insead Knowledge
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
How Nutriset, a French company, has helped alleviate hunger and create jobs in some of the world's poorest places
About 19 million children under 5 around the world suffer from severe acute malnutrition every year. This life-threatening condition kills 400,000 of them – that's one child every 10 seconds. These numbers are staggering, especially because a lifesaving treatment has existed for nearly three decades: 'ready-to-use therapeutic food.' Nutriset, a French company, was founded by Michel Lescanne. He was one of two scientists who invented this product in 1996. A sticky peanut butter paste branded Plumpy'nut, it's enriched with vitamins and minerals and comes in packets that require no refrigeration or preparation. Health care professionals were quickly convinced of its promise. What was harder to figure out was how to manufacture as many packets as possible while cutting costs. In 2008, ready-to-use therapeutic food producers like Nutriset charged US$60 for one box of 150 packets – the number needed to treat one severely malnourished child for the 6-8 weeks needed for their recovery. In a study we published in the Journal of Management Studies in October 2024, we explained how the international agencies, nongovernmental organizations, activists and for-profit companies involved in the product's distribution managed to resolve a public controversy over the use of Nutriset's patent and its for-profit business model. Contrary to the expectations of activists and many humanitarian NGOs, this for-profit company managed to reduce its prices down to $39 per box of Plumpy'nut packets by 2019 and keep them consistently lower than any nonprofit or for-profit competitors could, all the while enforcing its patent rights. We interviewed Jan Komrska, a pharmacist then serving as the ready-to-use therapeutic food procurement manager at UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children; Tiddo von Schoen-Angerer, a pediatrician who was leading the access to medicines campaign at Doctors Without Borders, a medical charity; and Thomas Couaillet, a Nutriset executive. We also studied documents issued over the course of a decade to find out why this company's unusual approach to intellectual property protection was so successful. Nutriset and humanitarian organizations disagreed at the start over how to proceed with the production of ready-to-use therapeutic food. Doctors Without Borders at first accused Nutriset of behaving like a big drugmaker, shielding itself from competition by aggressively enforcing its patents to charge excessively high prices. The nongovernmental organization demanded that Nutriset allow any manufacturer to make its patented packets, without any compensation for that intellectual property. By 2012, Nutriset had changed course. It had stopped being almost the sole producer of ready-to-use therapeutic food and instead allowed licensees and franchisee partners, chiefly located in low-income countries, to make the packets without having to pay any royalties. It did, however, make an exception for the United States. It allowed Edesia, a Rhode Island-based nonprofit, to become a Nutriset franchisee. It also provided these smaller producers with seed funding and technical advice. Nutriset is still the world's largest ready-to-use therapeutic food producer, we have determined through our research. It's responsible for about 30% to 40% of the world's annual production, down from more than 90% in 2008. There are some other U.S. manufacturers, such as Tabatchnick Fine Foods, but they aren't Nutriset partners. At the same time, the company continued to threaten to take legal action against potential rivals located in developed countries that were replicating their recipe without authorization. Usually, cease-and-desist letters were sufficient. Nutriset implemented this strategy to ward off competition from big multinational corporations that might try to establish their brands in new markets, gaining a foothold before flooding them with imported ultraprocessed food. A big risk, had that occurred, would have been less breastfeeding for newborns and the disruption of local diets. Nutriset's strategy of opening access to its patent selectively has enabled UNICEF to double the share of packets it buys from producers located in the Global South. UNICEF, the world's biggest buyer of ready-to-use therapeutic food, bought less than one-third of its supplies from those nations in 2011. That share climbed to two-thirds in 2022. Nutriset's reliance on local franchisees has helped create over 1,000 jobs in hunger-stricken regions while strengthening the supply chain and reducing the carbon emissions of transportation, according to UNICEF. Nutriset's creative patent strategy also helped its partner producers in low-income countries, which include nonprofit and for-profit ventures, compete with large corporations in developed countries by the time its patent expired in 2018. In this instance, a for-profit company not only managed to keep its prices lower than its competitors, including nonprofits, but used its patent to support economic development in developing countries by shielding startup producers from international competition. As a result of these successes, we found that nongovernmental organizations eventually stopped criticizing the French company and recognized that high prices were actually not due to Nutriset's patent policy but rather to global prices of the packets' ingredients. In recognition of its contributions and innovation, Nutriset won the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Patents for Humanity Award in 2015. One of the biggest advantages of ready-to-use therapeutic food is that parents or other caregivers can give it to their kids at home or on the go. That's more convenient and cheaper than the alternative: several months of hospitalization where children receive a nutrient-dense liquid called 'therapeutic milk.' The at-home treatment works most of the time. More than 80% of the children who get three daily food packets recover within two months. Severe acute malnutrition deaths remain high because historically only 25% to 50% of children suffering from it get treated with ready-to-use therapeutic food, due to insufficient funding. The treatment programs are run by governments, UNICEF and other international agencies, and NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders. The U.S. government spent about $200 million in 2024 through the U.S. Agency for International Development on ready-to-use therapeutic food, enough packets to treat 3.9 million children. That's nearly as much as UNICEF, which treats about 5 million children annually. It's unclear whether the Trump administration, which is trying to dismantle USAID, will discontinue its funding of ready-to-use therapeutic food that the U.S. government has purchased exclusively from U.S. manufacturers with U.S.-sourced ingredients. At a time when the flow of development aid from several wealthy countries is declining, the precedent Nutriset set suggests that humanitarian organizations, by teaming up with international agencies, governments and for-profit companies, can help drive down the costs of saving lives threatened by hunger while increasing the nutritional autonomy of the Global South. But the funding for ready-to-use therapeutic food and its distribution has to come from somewhere, whether it is from governments, foundations or other donors. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Nicolas Dahan, Seton Hall University and Bernard Leca, ESSEC Read more: As Trump tries to slash US foreign aid, here are 3 common myths many Americans mistakenly believe about it How nonprofits abroad can fill gaps when the US government cuts off foreign aid 3 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
