NAVIGATING CYBERSECURITY AND TRUST BARRIERS: A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF AI MANAGEMENT IN THE UAE SECURITY SECTOR
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35631/JISTM.1144038Keywords:
AI Governance, Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, Qualitative Research, Security Management, Trust, United Arab EmiratesAbstract
This qualitative research paper explores the interaction between cybersecurity vulnerabilities and trust barriers influencing artificial intelligence (AI) management practice in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) security industry, addressing a gap left by quantitative acceptance studies that have treated these barriers as independent variables rather than as interacting factors. The main conclusion is that low trust and cybersecurity vulnerability are not independent hindrances but support each other. AAn interpretivist, exploratory design used a purposive sampling strategy and semi-structured interviews with 35 participants comprising security professionals, AI managers, cybersecurity experts, and governance staff, and data were analysed thematically. The results indicate that AI-related vulnerabilities, particularly adversarial manipulation and data-integrity breach create opaque, unexplainable AI behaviour, to which individuals adjust with a contingent, multidimensional type of doubt instead of a broad-based technological scepticism. In security, governance has not yet been formalised as fast as AI deployment in comparison to more mature governance in service delivery fields like healthcare and municipal services and the most viable management solutions participants identify are hardening security and accountability-making instead of two distinct initiatives. The study introduces a reconceptualisation of trust in high-stakes AI environments that is founded on multidimensional, offering technological, human, and organisational fields and recommends that governance formalisation should be seen as a step toward, rather than a follow-up to AI deployment by UAE security organisations and regulators.
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