AI SECURITY

new SAS report, featuring research insights from IDC, has

The second annual Data and AI Impact Report: The New Economics of Trust found that organisations with the strongest governance, data quality and auditability practices consistently outperformed their peers, reporting at least double the ROI from AI deployments. Organisations applying trustworthy AI measures were also 15 times more likely to report strong ROI.

“ When AI works, it’ s incredibly impactful,” said Bryan Harris, CTO at SAS.“ However, it is well documented that state-of-the-art agents can have error rates that exceed 25 % on complex tasks – which is unacceptable in high-stakes decision-making. In order to achieve accuracy and repeatability, organisations must embed domain expertise into agentic workflows, while keeping people at the center of governance and oversight. Organisations that do this successfully will close the trust gap and gain a competitive advantage in the market with AI.”

Michel Ghorayeb, Managing Director, SAS UAE

The issue is particularly evident in the UAE, where insufficient explanation was cited by 41.1 % of respondents as the leading reason for overriding AI recommendations.

“ As AI becomes more autonomous, organizations face a new challenge: maintaining confidence in systems people don’ t fully understand,” said Chris Marshall, Vice President at IDC.“ Our findings show that stronger oversight, explainability, accountability and data foundations are becoming prerequisites for scaling AI successfully.”

In the UAE, the Trustworthiness Index climbed 30.2 points to 65.7 in 2026, putting the country above the global benchmark.

“ This progress reflects how quickly organizations in the UAE have moved from AI ambition to adoption; The UAE AI Strategy and the Dubai AI Roadmap pushed governance deployment into government and the private sector at an unprecedented pace. This capability is in response to a top-down deployment mandate, which explains why so much of it arrived at once” said Michel Ghorayeb, Managing Director, SAS UAE.

The report also identified a widening divide in AI returns. Organisations investing in trustworthy AI measures were 15 times more likely to report strong or high ROI, at 62 % compared with 4 %. Those with the strongest trustworthy AI practices achieved 1.85 times greater gains across 13 business outcomes, including revenue growth, cost savings and customer experience.

Data foundations remain another challenge. Only 17.5 % of enterprises globally have fully optimised data infrastructure considered mature enough for agentic AI. Organisations with optimised data foundations were four times more likely to expect strong ROI from AI projects.

In the UAE, data quality and governance emerged as the leading reliability priority, rising to 62.2 % in 2026. However, only 13.5 % of organisations mandate data-quality processes for every AI project, highlighting a gap between awareness and implementation.

The research highlighted explainability as an increasingly important issue as AI systems gain greater autonomy. Some 97.2 % of users override AI-generated recommendations in at least some cases, with the inability of AI to explain its decisions emerging as the leading reason for overrides. Trust also declined from 76 % for generative AI to 66 % for agentic AI.

The findings are based on a survey of 2,699 decision-makers across 28 countries and four industries: banking, insurance, life sciences and the public sector. The study assessed trustworthy AI across five areas: data quality and governance, model governance and oversight, explainability and fairness, responsible AI policy and audit and accountability.

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