How to best incorporate AI models, especially in the workplace, still controls discussions happening around the office and the C-suite. But the more companies lean into adopting artificial intelligence, the risks around this new tech remain blurry.

Yahoo Finance’s Julie Hyman and Brian Sozzi sit down with Accenture (ACN) CEO Julie Sweet at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to discuss AI risk management and whether CEOs or government regulators should take the lead on addressing this.

Sweet states that in recent conversations with CEOs, less than 2% of executives could identify how AI is being used in their companies and its risks. Sweet insists there needs to be a movement from implementing principles to "operationalizing" risk assessment processes. "It starts now and you can’t wait until the regulation.”

It's all part of Yahoo Finance's exclusive coverage from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where our team will speak to top decision-makers as well as preeminent leaders in business, finance, and politics about the world’s most pressing issues and priorities for the coming year.

Watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live here.

Editor's note: This article was written by Eyek Ntekim.

Video Transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: How prepared are companies for downside risks from AI?

JULIE SWEET: Very early days. So you know, I ask a simple question to CEOs, can you call someone in your organization and ask them where AI is being used, what are the risks, and how they're being managed? Most CEOs today cannot do that, less than 2%.

So what we're doing is helping CEOs know how do you move from lots of principles-- there's a stack of information about what principles should be-- to how do you operationalize it? So when you're, you know, going to do something in sales, you need to know will I have risks around bias? So what is that risk? So you have to get to operationalizing it very early days. What we're doing, we're working in over 700 projects is we're doing it project by project while we help our clients build out the capability.

But gen AI is a very important technology. Reinvention is real. And what that means is there are things that don't exist today like responsible AI capabilities that need to be built.

JULIE HYMAN: And so how do we do that then?

JULIE SWEET: Well, you can hire Accenture, so that's one way.

JULIE HYMAN: But things also need to happen on the government level, on the policy level. I mean, I know there's been a lot of discussion around that as well.

JULIE SWEET: The answer is yes and yes, right? So it first starts with-- because you can't wait for policy. So what we first say to clients is that you have to understand-- you set aside principles, but then you understand what do you have to do. So it's very simple.

At Accenture if someone wants to use AI, it automatically gets routed to a capability that assesses the risk. That is something every company needs to have. That is not a mystery. It's not a capability they have now, but they have to do it.

And what I think is important is that in every workshop that we have, all of the CEOs, all of the C-suite are super focused on this point. They said, we want to understand what it looks like. Not the principles, but that's practical. That means my CIO needs to have that capability.

I think you're going to see we'll come back in a year and we're going to have a very different conversation. It's not going to be less than 2% of companies. Companies are really focused on that. And on the flip side, now governments got to have to think about what do they need to do in terms of regulation, which will be mostly around the use cases. But it starts now and you can't wait till the regulation.