Around 27% of organizations have already banned its use
Most organizations have limited the use of Generative AI (GenAI) in their workplace following data privacy and security issues, a report by Cisco found.
In its 2024 Data Privacy Benchmark Study, about 27% of organizations were found to have temporarily banned the use of GenAI.
“Organizations see GenAI as a fundamentally different technology with novel challenges to consider,” said Dev Stahlkopf, Cisco’s chief legal officer.
Stahlkopf further stated that more than 90% of respondents were found to believe that GenAI required new techniques to manage their data as well as the risk to their organizations.
“This is where thoughtful governance comes into play. Preserving customer trust depends on it,” said Stahlkopf.
Businesses have stated that the top threats to their organization were legal and Intellectual Property rights (69%) and the risk of disclosure of information to either the public or their competitors (68%). Most of them have expressed their awareness regarding such risks and were putting controls in place to limit their exposure.
About 63% have established limitations regarding the type of data that can be entered in the program, while 61% limited the GenAI tools that their employees can use. Meanwhile, 27% have completely banned GenAI applications temporarily. Many respondents said that entering employee information (45%) and non-public information about the organization (48%) may still possibly be problematic.
With consumers also expressing concern to the use of AI when it comes to their data, about 91% admitted that they need to do more when it comes to reassuring their customers that their data will only be used for intended and legitimate purposes. Notably, this was still similar to the levels seen in the previous years.
Respondents also stated that their top priorities when it comes to the use of AI were privacy laws compliance (25%) as well as avoiding breaches in data (23%).
“94% of respondents said their customers would not buy from them if they did not adequately protect data,” said Harvey Jang, Cisco’s vice president and chief privacy officer.
“They are looking for hard evidence the organization can be trusted. Privacy has become inextricably tied to customer trust and loyalty. This is even more true in the era of AI, where investing in privacy better positions organizations to leverage AI ethically and responsibly,” he added.
While 80% of the respondents said that the enactment of privacy laws had impacted them positively, about 6% have said that its impact was negative. Around 95% of businesses said that the benefits of privacy had exceeded its costs as the organizations reported having privacy benefits that were 1.6 times their spending on average.
Organizations with more than 10,000 employees had notably increased their privacy spending by 7 to 8%, while smaller organizations had notably decreased their investments in privacy.
Cisco is a multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation. Its Data Privacy Benchmark Study is an annual review of key privacy issues and how they impact businesses, which draws from the responses of 2,600 privacy and security professionals across 12 geographies.
