KPMG recently surveyed a large body of executives at US firms about their deployment of AI over the past year and discovered a huge uptick. Financial services saw the greatest increase at 37%, perhaps triggering more attention from regulators covered in our last issue and the request for comment covered below. Despite high confidence that AI helped during the pandemic, there was a pervasive concern that faster adoption is introducing more risks to the business than they might like. One of the report authors, Rob Dwyer, summarizes: "We are seeing very high levels of support this year across all industries for more AI regulation...a more robust regulatory environment may help facilitate commerce. It can help remove unintended barriers that may be the result of other laws or regulations, or due to lack of maturity of legal and technical standards." Financial services again led the increase at 27% more desiring government involvement.
In a similar vein, Stanford's HAI published their annual State of AI report, an exhaustive look at developments through 2020. This summary article captures the trends, which also included record corporate investment, soaring attention to ethics in research, rising worries about regulatory compliance, and huge strategic interest and investment across the globe.