New research from analytics automation company Alteryx, Inc. shows that almost half of employees now believe that data ethics are “irrelevant” to their role.

Alteryx claims that as a result of poor training programmes, AI projects will continue to pose an ethical minefield for companies throughout the UK, with AI projects – and associated benefits – falling at the first hurdle.

Trustworthy AI is rooted in quality information, but with untrained employees delivering dirty data, inconsistent, biased and unusable AI is the end result.

New Alteryx-commissioned YouGov research surveyed 1,000 British workers in large companies with a responsibility for data. This new information shows that 40% of organisations only offer formal training to data scientists and existing business analysts (29%), leaving the remainder working in something of an ethical chasm.

With training hitting a shortfall, at-capacity data scientists are being further overloaded. Of those polled who could be considered highly skilled workers, 33% still spend, on average, at least nine hours a week on basic data cleansing, blending, and shaping.

This is work that could easily be completed by those in other roles if simple training were offered, allowing more complex problems to be tackled by the top-tier data scientists.

Furthermore, 57% of these data scientists say their business is “not making the full use of the data” it has and 61% say that employees are “lacking the data literacy skills needed to meet today’s business challenges”. Highlighting the strong appetite and need for data skills to drive their careers forward, however, 64% of those employees say that data training should be expanded to all data workers.

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“With data scientists remaining wizards in an ivory tower, a much-needed digital-first cultural shift has dramatically stalled,” comments Alan Jacobson, Chief Data and Analytic Officer at Alteryx.

He adds: “What we now see is an AI conundrum with no end in sight. While data is increasingly the common language of business, few receive the training to deliver any benefit from it, with the remainder relegated to working in the dark.

“Even with recent Budget news that the number of Data Science conversion courses are set to double, the value of this training is questionable without a core ethics foundation present across the workforce.”

With little formal training available, UK employees are turning to informal word-of-mouth education, risking an unintentional continuation of critical bias, and exacerbating existing challenges. 29% of employees say they pursue “informal mentoring” through colleagues, and 20% utilise “informal user groups”.

Posing a further risk to UK businesses, 45% of employees say a core motivation to upskilling is the ability to find a better role when they begin look for another job. 25% of respondees in manufacturing say they are willing to spend at least six hours a week upskilling, along with to 24% of those in IT, and 19% in R&D.

“Many business leaders believe that transformation and AI projects are exclusively about the technology, but any technology is only ever a tool to deliver human ingenuity,” comments Richard Timperlake, Senior Vice President, EMEA, at Alteryx.

“The lack of consistent training, and subsequent lack of standardised knowledge is a core challenge for the UK’s future technology projects – particularly new AI strategies,” he adds.

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