70% Are Confident in Their AI Policies. 11% Have Checked the Outputs.

Published by

richardorich

on

October 26, 2026

What

IFS, an industrial software vendor, surveyed more than 2,200 senior decision makers in 14 countries. Over 70% said they were confident in their safety and data policies. But only 11% had validated AI outputs for safety-, quality- or mission-critical processes, and only 4% required mandatory human oversight or approval for AI-supported decisions.

So What

Treat the numbers with care: this is a vendor survey, and the answers are self-reported. Even so, the gap is the story. Feeling confident and having evidence are different things. In operations, we don’t trust a gauge because we feel good about it. We calibrate it against a known standard.

Now What

Pick one AI-supported decision that touches quality, safety or customers. Run the AI and the manual process side by side until the results agree, or until you know exactly where they don’t. Write down who approves the output and what happens when they say no. Confidence is where you start, not where you finish.

Source: IFS Industrial AI Index 2026, as reported by Channel Post MEA, Oct 19, 2026

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