As the artificial intelligence (AI) boom sweeps into the business world, employees are increasingly concerned about ethics questions and data privacy, a new Deloitte survey found, leading them to increasingly lose trust in their organizations.

More than half of the 1,800 business and technical professionals Deloitte surveyed around the globe said AI presents the most severe ethical risk among emerging technologies, significantly higher than robotics, quantum computing, cryptocurrency, or autonomous vehicles. Last year, 57 percent of respondents had expressed similar sentiments, slightly more than this year’s 54 percent but still higher than 2022’s 41 percent. At the same time, 46 percent of respondents said AI would drive the most social good, up from 39 percent last year and 33 percent the year before.

The message, at least for now, is that even though businesses can’t afford to ignore AI, they need to implement ethics and safety guardrails too, said Beena Ammanath, leader of Deloitte’s Technology Trust Ethics practice.

“There’s a demand from employees who want to learn more,” she said. Deloitte’s survey found that increasingly more people are being trained on AI, but their followup questions are not being answered. Companies, she said, need clearer and more consistent AI tech policies.

The report comes as companies are increasingly grappling with the pressures to adopt AI technologies but do it in a responsible way. Most of the survey respondents told Deloitte their companies had instituted mandatory technology ethics training, but just 27 percent reported distinct standards for AI.

These issues will be at the heart of many discussions at Compliance Week’s AI & Compliance Summit on Oct. 8-9 in Boston, where we will delve into the benefits, potential risks, and ethical considerations surrounding this rapidly evolving technology. A week later, we’ll hold Compliance Week Europe, a two-day conference in Amsterdam starting Oct. 15, where Compliance Week and its sister organization, the International Compliance Association, will be bringing together more than 200 GRC professionals across tech, banking, media, manufacturing, and healthcare to help discuss how they’re making sense of a constantly changing business environment.