A new study by SAS and IDC, the second annual Data and AI Impact Report titled ‘The New Economics of Trust‘, found that organisations with stronger artificial intelligence governance and data practices are significantly more likely to report higher returns from their AI investments. Organisations applying trustworthy AI practices were 15 times more likely to report strong or high returns on investment from their AI projects, and those with the strongest governance, data quality and auditability practices reported at least twice the return on investment from AI deployments compared with other organisations, though SAS said this group represented a comparatively small part of the market. Fewer than one in 20 organisations identified as laggards in trustworthy AI reported similarly strong returns. SAS chief technology officer Bryan Harris said state-of-the-art agents can have error rates that exceed 25 per cent on complex tasks, and that organisations must embed domain expertise into agentic workflows while keeping people at the centre of governance and oversight. IDC vice president Chris Marshall said stronger oversight, explainability, accountability and data foundations are becoming prerequisites for scaling AI successfully. The report found employees frequently override AI-generated recommendations, with 97.2 per cent of users doing so in at least some cases, most commonly because the system could not explain the reasoning behind its decision, and that trust in AI declined as systems became more autonomous.