Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: Implications on Users' Security and Privacy Perceptions

Introduction

In the last years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has increasingly impacted our world, and it has been successfully applied to several areas, including Industry, Engineering, Life Sciences, Business, and Education, just to name a few. AI is a multidisciplinary field combining science and engineering aiming to create intelligent machines (Benaich & Hogart, 2022). The world is becoming more and more digital and data-driven, as such, AI will advance technological progress at a rapid pace. Nowadays, everything around us, from culture to consumer products, is a product of intelligence (Benaich & Hogart, 2022).

Even without knowing, we use AI in various ways daily, making our routines more efficient and accessible. Whenever we use a digital assistant like Google Assistant, Siri, or a map application, AI improves interaction and answers our questions. AI, however, does not restrict only to consumers. The impact of AI in different industries is quite significant, ranging from self-driving cars to financial advisory services. Companies are integrating AI models and applications into their business models as a critical efficiency component (Dwivedi et al., 2021). Companies report that AI fosters revenue in sales and marketing while reducing costs in supply chain management and manufacturing functions (Sadok, n.a).

This has led companies to an overcoming shift that has moved their businesses toward a more technological level rather than a more traditional and personal level. Experts estimate that by 2025, 95% of customer interactions will use AI-assisted channels and that the next generation of consumers will be assisted by chatbot applications (Anica-Popa et al., 2021). With the increasing use of AI applications, people are progressively more dependent on these technologies. For companies, AI technologies entail several benefits: increased revenues, sales reinforcement, price segmentation from the customer database, customer satisfaction, lower product returns, and cost reduction (Syam & Sharma, 2018). Therefore, companies must progress toward digitalizing their processes and functions using AI in service automation.

AI and service automation enables many companies to improve their processes and increase workers' productivity. However, it can also pose a threat, as is reshaping the job industry by replacing workers (Frank et al., 2019). Also, it may impact customers emotional sense as human beings. According to Bolton et al. (2018), customers who feel detached, frustrated, alienated, or isolated rather than involved in the customer experience may limit their adoption of this technology. Organizations have the challenge of balancing the efficiency and efficacy of digital technology while enhancing interactions and relationships with their customers, which must be the focus of their value proposition.

This dependency on AI can raise a significant risk for organizations and customers. Organizations use AI to maintain good customer service and optimize costs and the delivery of services. This way, the customer service is less personalized, might lack transparency, and can raise concerns about privacy and security issues, resulting in unhappy customers. Furthermore, using AI applications in some contexts can result in client harm, especially when AI is applied to medicine and healthcare. For example, questions have arisen about whether or not AI can exercise the same rights as doctors (Sunarti et al., 2021). It is essential to understand how to mitigate this risk and in what contexts they might emerge. As such, we need to know how customers interact with these applications and their trustworthiness, as they are becoming a big part of any company's service infrastructure. Understanding customer privacy and security perceptions around the different AI applications in various fields is important.