What Should AI Actually Be Trusted To Do In The Enterprise?

Rujul Zaparde, cofounder and CEO, Zip.

​On the morning of October 20, 2015, a young research team invited a legally blind man into a car on a residential street in Austin, where he rode for 10 minutes with no one at the wheel.

This was the first fully driverless ride on a public road in America, courtesy of the team that would become Waymo.

Now, eleven years later, I can sit in a driverless Waymo and cruise the streets in San Francisco while answering Slack messages. The sight of driverless Waymos has faded into the background in the city; other than a few tourists on Market Street, almost no one bats an eye anymore at the sight of a fully autonomous car with an empty driver’s seat.​

When business leaders ask me how to bring reliable AI into the enterprise, my answer starts with the “trust layer,” which is exactly what Waymo built between those two rides. Here is how, at our company, we build trust through governance.

How Waymo Earned The Trust To Scale

Waymo logged tens of millions of supervised miles, and billions more in simulation, under the tightest oversight on the hardest decisions a machine can face. These logged miles produced a record that regulators, insurers and cities could freely audit, culminating in a record that shows 90% fewer serious-injury crashes than with human drivers in the same cities.

Waymo earned the right to the empty driver’s seat by building proof that outsiders could trust and verify. After demonstrating repeatable governance to the required guardrails, autonomy was free to follow.

Trust is the emergent property of transparent governance. This holds for a car at a four-way stop, and it holds for an AI agent about to approve a seven-figure business software renewal.

Executives Ready For Autonomy They Can Trust

According to our recent survey (login required) of 1,050 procurement, finance, IT and operations leaders, 93% expect procurement technology to change materially over the next three to five years. We expect them to be right about that.​