{"id":79238,"date":"2024-08-28T05:07:10","date_gmt":"2024-08-28T03:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/intellias.com\/?post_type=blog&p=79238"},"modified":"2025-12-23T14:00:44","modified_gmt":"2025-12-23T12:00:44","slug":"how-to-build-an-ai-product-customers-trust","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/intellias.com\/building-an-ai-product\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Build an AI Product Customers Trust"},"content":{"rendered":"
According to the Ipsos Global Views on AI 2023, 52% of people reported feeling nervous about AI products\u2014up 13% from 18 months earlier. Apparently, increasing exposure to generative AI<\/a> and other artificial intelligence is making customers trust AI products less, not more.<\/p>\n So, while demand for AI services and solutions<\/a> is high, customer confidence in AI is slower to follow. For this reason, before you set out to develop an AI product, make sure there\u2019s a plan in place to build confidence as well.<\/p>\n Addressing customer concerns openly and transparently is crucial to building trust. Understanding how your customers interact with AI is the first step to developing a trustworthy AI product. So, before you start an AI project, read on to explore ways to design trustworthy AI products and tackle bias in AI<\/a>. We\u2019ll also examine customers\u2019 demand for transparency and explain how we build AI software that alleviates those concerns.<\/p>\n AI use cases typically fall under two broad categories: automation and augmentation. Each type is suited for certain tasks and offers benefits and challenges.<\/p>\n Both methods promise to increase capacity and reduce human error, but the initial investment can be high. Automation can involve high up-front costs and raise concerns about job loss. On the other hand, augmentation\u2014which uses AI to enhance emploees\u2019 capabilities<\/a>\u2014requires extensive integration and user training.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s take a closer look at these two main ways of using AI:<\/p>\n First, let\u2019s define automation in AI. Automation uses AI to perform repetitive, data-driven tasks without human effort. Examples range from AI-driven data analysis tools to automated quality control systems and manufacturing robots.<\/p>\n Benefits of automation:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n For example, Intellias uses AI assistance in the development process to speed software delivery to our customers. See how our team used GitHub Copilot to deliver a turnkey healthcare benefits management solution<\/a> in a short timeframe.<\/p>\n Of course, as AI makes automation easier and more intelligent<\/a>, there\u2019s an elephant in the room: job displacement. As more tasks become automated, will human workers become obsolete?<\/p>\n Challenges of automation:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Even before GenAI, McKinsey analyzed a huge swath of activities across over 800 occupations to explore which could be easily automated. They found that, across all sectors, about half of workers\u2019 activities<\/a> were automatable. These activities ranged from physical tasks, like lifting and stacking boxes, to digital tasks, including data collection and processing. In 60% of occupations, about 30% of activities could be automated.<\/p>\n Job displacement is a valid concern that can be addressed with proper planning and upskilling initiatives.<\/p>\n Can Generative AI Unlock New Growth Opportunities?<\/p>\n Augmentation in AI is all about supporting and enhancing human capabilities rather than replacing them entirely. Unlike automation, which aims to take over specific tasks, augmentation acts as a complementary force, amplifying human productivity and fostering innovation. By offloading the heavy lifting of data processing and analysis<\/a> to intelligent systems, humans can focus on higher-level thinking, creativity, and strategy.<\/p>\n Benefits of augmentation:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Challenges of augmentation:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Let’s walk through some notable examples that underscore AI’s potential to augment human capabilities across various sectors:<\/p>\n Automation? Augmentation? It\u2019s not an either-or decision. Both ways of using AI can coexist in a business strategy. However, the choice of which method to use and when can be a friction point, which can sow distrust.<\/p>\n According to the 2024 Global Survey from Workday<\/a>, 42% of employees say their company lacks a clear understanding of which systems need human intervention and which can be fully automated. \u201cWhen it comes to organizations adopting and deploying AI responsibly, there is a lack of trust at all levels of the workforce, particularly from employees,\u201d says the report.<\/p>\n By understanding and addressing the benefits and challenges your customers face, you can develop AI products that enhance human capabilities and foster trust among users. If used thoughtfully, both automation and augmentation can maximize productivity<\/a> and innovation while maintaining transparency and accountability.<\/p>\n Several factors influence trust in AI, including transparency, reliability, ethical considerations, and user engagement. As such, building AI products that customers trust requires a multifaceted approach. Here are some ways to address these factors step by step while you make an AI product.<\/p>\n Need help with making AI work for your business? Our Design Thinking workshop for AI can help.<\/p>\n Trust by design means developing an AI in a way that helps users feel safe and confident about using it. It’s about being clear on how your AI product makes decisions and making sure it treats everyone fairly. Let’s explore methods to build AI software that people can trust:<\/p>\n Communicate performance metrics<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n One of the most effective ways to build trust is by communicating the performance metrics of your AI systems. You can demonstrate your AI\u2019s effectiveness with:<\/p>\n Present these metrics clearly, ensuring and explaining their relevance to users, and update them consistently.<\/p>\n Illustrate confidence levels<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Quantifying the confidence levels of AI decisions helps users understand how reliable a system is. Display confidence scores\u2014the likelihood of the AI\u2019s recommendation or prediction<\/a> being accurate\u2014alongside AI decisions and set clear thresholds for these scores. These confidence metrics will help manage user expectations and build trust in the AI\u2019s output.<\/p>\n Provide explanations for AI reasoning<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Understanding is vital to trust. Users need to know how and why artificial intelligence makes certain decisions. Developing interactive tools that let users explore AI decision-making processes<\/a> can significantly enhance trust. Use interpretable models and provide simplified explanations of complex AI processes.<\/p>\n Acknowledge limitations<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Sometimes, your AI will not have the correct answer. Set expectations by acknowledging your AI model’s limitations from the outset.<\/p>\n Communicate openly about what the AI can and cannot do, establish mechanisms for error reporting, and show a commitment to ongoing improvement based on user feedback and new data. Customers will appreciate your integrity, fostering trust in your AI product.<\/p>\n Keep a human-in-the-Loop<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Integrating human oversight is a great way to enhance trust. If your AI is making critical decisions, make sure humans review them.<\/p>\n Implement stages where experts review AI model outputs and develop systems that facilitate collaboration between AI and human workers. Keeping human eyes on models throughout the process helps ensure that AI decisions align with humans\u2019 values and expectations.<\/p>\n Define accountability<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Accountability is essential for trust. Clearly define who is responsible for the AI\u2019s actions and decisions, adhering to ethical guidelines, and ensuring compliance. Accountability demonstrates a commitment to responsible AI use and builds user trust.<\/p>\n Support user onboarding<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Any time you\u2019re creating AI products, product development is only the beginning.<\/p>\n Designing effective user onboarding can raise trust in your AI products. Provide comprehensive training materials and sessions for users to establish robust support systems for navigating and using AI-powered products effectively. Consider creating channels for users to provide feedback and suggestions.<\/p>\n Bias in AI is a big problem.<\/p>\n Let’s explore where these biases come from, how they can affect us, and what we can do to make AI more fair for everyone. Bypassing the biases will help you create a better AI product, solve the business challenges of early product deployment, and reduce associated risks.<\/p>\n Bias can lead to unfair decisions or cause harm, so before you make an AI product, be very mindful to avoid these issues. As you review the examples below, imagine how these biases could affect outcomes in high-stakes real-world situations such as AI-powered healthcare triage, judicial sentencing, or self-driving automobile collision avoidance.<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to think of AI algorithms as objective tools. However, as people make them, they can inadvertently amplify human biases. These biases can manifest in various ways, often impacting marginalized groups disproportionately.<\/p>\n Encouraging diversity among team members developing AI systems is a powerful way to bring a variety of perspectives into the development process. Diversity reduces the risk of individual biases affecting the model you\u2019re building.<\/p>\n Bias audits and reviews are another important tool for anyone building AI software. Make a habit of conducting regular bias checks to identify and mitigate biases in the algorithms and outputs.<\/p>\n Data reflects the biases that exist(ed) in society when data is\/was collected. In other words, if you create an AI system trained on outdated data, the output may reflect outdated perspectives.<\/p>\n For example, consider an AI trained to screen job applicants. Suppose it is trained on decades of data from a specific company’s domain<\/a> that had a record of favoring certain demographics or preferring men in managerial roles and women in administrative roles. In that case, the output would reflect these biases.<\/p>\n This AI model may recommend candidates based more on demographics that fit the profile of historical data instead of focusing on their education, skills, and professional experience.<\/p>\n Representation bias arises when the data used to train an AI system doesn’t fully capture the diversity of the group it’s meant to serve. This often leads to certain segments of the population being under-represented.<\/p>\n For example, if a speech recognition system is mostly trained on voice data from native English speakers, it might struggle to recognize accents or dialects from non-native speakers accurately.<\/p>\n Another example is a facial recognition system<\/a> trained predominantly with images of men, which may perform less accurately in identifying women, particularly if it has not been exposed to a balanced gender dataset during its training phase.<\/p>\n Steps to mitigate representation biases:<\/p>\n Measurement bias refers to inaccuracies that occur when the metrics or indicators chosen to represent a concept do not effectively capture it or when these measurements vary inconsistently across different groups. This bias can lead to misleading conclusions.<\/p>\n An example would be using body mass index (BMI) as a proxy for an individual’s health or fitness level. BMI might not accurately reflect a person’s overall health as a single factor. It doesn’t distinguish between muscle and fat mass or account for distribution of fat or muscle. If a model focuses on BMI over other metrics, athletes or individuals with high muscle mass might be incorrectly classified as overweight or obese.<\/p>\n Steps to mitigate measurement biases:<\/p>\n Learning bias is the tendency of machine learning models to develop certain biases based on the training data and learning algorithms used during development. Learning bias leads to performance discrepancies among different demographic groups. This is often a result of a model’s cost function optimizing for overall performance without ensuring fairness and consistency across these groups, leading to unequal outcomes.<\/p>\n MLOps for Productizing AI: The Lean Approach to Model Development.<\/p>\n Mozilla Trustworthy AI fellow Apryl Williams explains<\/a>, \u201cWe know that facial recognition systems work best on the populations that created them.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor instance, facial recognition systems that were designed in Asia, work best on those in Asian populations. Facial detection systems designed in the US work best on those with what are perceived as standard European features. This indicates that those who train these systems, do so with inherent bias \u2014 this bias impacts users outside of majority populations.\u201d<\/p>\n As another example, speech recognition models may perform well on widely spoken accents, but poorly on dialects or accents with fewer speakers. This occurs because the model was optimized for the majority, thus sidelining the linguistic nuances and accuracy needed for less represented accents.<\/p>\n Steps to mitigate learning biases:<\/p>\n While creating AI software, remember that AI-powered products can also be repurposed in ways that magnify biases and inequalities.<\/p>\n Deployment bias occurs when there is a gap between a technology’s intended use and real-world deployment. This can happen when an AI developer starts an AI project without fully accounting for the real-world context in which it could operate.<\/p>\n An example is a facial recognition system designed for security purposes. The AI product could be intended to identify persons of interest in crowded public spaces. However, someone could use this system to track and surveil certain demographic groups. This use deviates significantly from the product\u2019s original security-enhancing purpose.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why it\u2019s important to consider the broader implications and potential uses of the technology any time you create an AI system.<\/p>\n Steps to mitigate deployment biases:<\/p>\n Feedback loop bias is another type of bias that appears after deployment. This issue occurs when the system’s setup leads it to influence its own training data. Over time, this can skew model outputs.<\/p>\n An example of this is in predictive policing, where law enforcement uses algorithms to predict crime hot spots. If a system directs more police patrols to areas it predicts as high-risk, the increased police presence in those areas may lead to higher numbers of reported crimes.<\/p>\n A person would realize this increase doesn\u2019t reflect an actual increase in crime rates; it\u2019s just the effect of additional surveillance. However, the rise in reports causes the algorithm to further highlight these areas as high-risk, creating a self-reinforcing cycle. The outcome is a disproportionate focus on particular neighborhoods and potentially the neglect of other areas.<\/p>\n Steps to mitigate feedback loop biases:<\/p>\n We\u2019ve covered a lot of ways to check that the AI model you build is trustworthy. But that\u2019s only half the battle; users need to see and understand how and why it is trustworthy. That calls for transparency.<\/p>\n AI is often a black-box system, which can hinder trust-building. We promote a glass-box strategy of product development<\/a> to ensure clarity throughout the AI development process.<\/p>\n When users have visibility into how their data is used and understand the inner workings of the AI models they\u2019re using, they can feel assured that the system is doing what they want it to.<\/p>\n Here are some effective strategies for achieving transparency in data-driven processes:<\/p>\n Easy-to-understand models<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Making AI more accessible and less intimidating builds trust.<\/p>\n Use models that customers can easily grasp to help them understand how your AI uses data and makes decisions. Decision trees or linear models are good choices.<\/p>\n Simplified explanations<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Breaking down complex algorithms into simpler terms helps users understand without getting lost in technical details. It\u2019s essential to give clear, concise explanations of how the AI works, what data it uses, and how it makes decisions.<\/p>\n By combining both approaches, you can make sure that users without a technical background can still grasp the essentials of how the AI operates.<\/p>\n AI in Urban Mobility: Give Citizens What They Want or Die Trying.<\/p>\n Highlighting key factors in decision-making<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Remember, it\u2019s hard to trust a black box system. Show which input factors are most important to model decisions. This will help users understand what influences outcomes and feel more control and trust.<\/p>\n You\u2019ll need to identify and communicate the main variables that the AI considers when making predictions or decisions. For example, in a credit scoring model, you could highlight factors including income, credit history, and debt-to-income ratio. This shows users the reasoning behind certain decisions.<\/p>\n When users can see that decisions are based on relevant and understandable criteria, they are more likely to trust the AI.<\/p>\n Exploring “What-if” scenarios<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Make it easy for users to explore the impact of varying inputs on the model’s outcomes. \u201cWhat-if\u201d scenarios offer an interactive way for users to explore key factors in decision-making for themselves. This functionality shows how changes in input data could affect model predictions in different situations.<\/p>\n For instance, someone using a loan approval model could adjust their income and debt levels to see how they affect their chances of approval. Interactive exploration with an AI product helps users understand the model’s sensitivity to different factors and how decisions might change under different circumstances.<\/p>\n The most important part of designing and building AI products and services is earning your customer\u2019s trust. Whether your goal is developing an AI app with OpenAI or building an AI platform from scratch, you need to consider the end users\u2019 needs and concerns.<\/p>\n Any time you or your team are developing custom AI software<\/a>, it\u2019s crucial to build trust by design.<\/p>\n Customers\u2019 artificial intelligence needs are a moving target, but customer trust is always built on communication and transparency.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve covered a variety of ways to bake trust in while designing and building AI products and services. Here are the highlights:<\/p>\n When you\u2019re ready to develop an AI product customers love and trust, the product engineering<\/a> and AI\/ML experts at Intellias are here to help your business get AI right.<\/p>\nUnderstanding automation and augmentation<\/h2>\n
Automation: AI reducing dependency on human labor<\/h3>\n
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Augmentation: AI enhancing human effort<\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nBlending automation and augmentation in business strategy<\/h3>\n
Building trustworthy AI products<\/h3>\n
Trust in AI by Design<\/h3>\n
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Understanding and addressing bias in AI models<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\nAlgorithmic bias<\/h3>\n
Historical bias<\/h4>\n
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Representation bias<\/h4>\n
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Measurement bias<\/h4>\n
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Learning bias<\/h4>\n
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Deployment bias<\/h3>\n
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Feedback loop bias<\/h3>\n
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How to win customers\u2019 trust with transparency in AI<\/h2>\n
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Take the next step<\/h2>\n
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