UEGroup says businesses should cater to people's values when adopting technology such as AI. Its study found that people see AI as generally trustworthy.  

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San Jose, California | March 24, 2023 03:30 PM Eastern Daylight Time

Product design and customer insights agency UEGroup has conducted a study on what values held by people drive their use of artificial intelligence language models. Titled “Core Value Alignment for AI Adoption”, the study can provide designers of AI tools and businesses that seek to integrate AI with a guide on how and why people will seek to use the feature.

UEGroup is a CX strategy, product design and customer insights agency with a team made up of designers, researchers, strategists, and visionaries. They work with leading organizations in high-stakes environments, such as medical, automotive, and big tech, to create human-centered design and achieve results for businesses.

The study had two parts, the first being an initial 15-minute survey that had 426 adult respondents sampled from across the United States. Almost two-thirds of respondents have heard of ChatGPT, but only around one-third have used it in the past month. Among the people who were aware of ChatGPT, 97% said that they expect to use it in the future, with 39% planning to use it regularly. However, 62% said that they preferred talking to humans over chat bots.

From this pool of respondents, 18 participants were invited to UEGroup’s usability lab for in-depth interviews, 11 of whom have used ChatGPT at least once, while 7 have never used the tool before. Participants were asked to use ChatGPT in three use cases, making a purchasing decision, researching sensitive information, and supporting professional responsibilities (using AI for work or job applications). UEGroup observed the participants' outcomes and then probed further information to discover the core values and ultimately why and how they would want to interact with AI.

In addition to collecting quantitative information, emotion and standard ratings were also collected. Participants used UEGroup’s proprietary emotions tool, youXemotions, to report their emotions towards each of the use cases, and most of them reported positive feelings towards all three use cases. Participants placed ChatGPT’s average satisfaction and ease-of-use ratings at above 4 on a 5-point scale.

The in-depth interviews sought to identify three levels of use from the participants, first being the attributes and what features people want, second being what outcomes participants gain from these features, and lastly how values ultimately drive both those outcomes and desires. Outcomes included saving money, helping with communication, helping with decision-making, saving time, and reducing effort and stress. From these, the study distilled five core values that ultimately drive AI use – productivity & control, safety & security, connectedness & caring for others, achievement & competency, and approval from others.

Productivity & control and safety & security were seen most frequently across all use cases.

According to UEGroup, the decision to use AI technology and ultimately adopt it is greatly influenced by human values. And, for users to be accepting about AI, both technology creators and businesses should make sure that their application of the technology aligns with people's values. The team is focused on analyzing the intersection of AI and user experience, and what that means for products and businesses, as well as the implications of collecting data to train these systems.

The study highlighted that there is a somewhat intrinsic trust that exists because the responses it produces are viewed as both compelling and professional by participants. Businesses can benefit from this by tapping into people's innate thirst for information as shown by participants placing high value on productivity & control and safety & security. Although there is still a level of control that people want to maintain over the tool, businesses and organizations who seek to use AI, need to take into account that the use of the tool is driven by one of the 5 values it identified, says UEGroup. In order for AI technology to be beneficial to real people, they need to speak to them from the lens of one of these 5 values.

UEGroup's Danielle Panigall says: “Artificial intelligence is game-changing across industries, as we are starting to see, but in order for businesses to reap the benefits, they need to align with how people (i.e. their customers) want to use this technology, how they feel about it now, and who they see it evolving for the future.”