Amid shaken trust in U.S. institutions, information is our most valuable currency. Enter artificial intelligence, which is revolutionizing our access to information and informing Americans in ways once thought unimaginable. From politics to law and media, everyday Americans are on a quest to harness AI to get more informed than ever.
And yet, “AI doomerism” dominates the headlines. As AI shows advances from medicine to market research, fearmongering is easy to come by, with skeptics criticizing Silicon Valley and questioning the need for this next frontier of private-sector innovation.
Of course, there are downsides to AI research, development, and deployment. Concerns about misinformation and disinformation are only compounded today. For example, 85 percent of Americans are concerned about AI spreading fake audio and video to the masses. According to our own research, 83 percent of U.S. consumers are concerned about AI’s impact on trust in polling itself.
But, like with technological innovation of yesteryear, we must trust in the ingenuity of American entrepreneurs to deliver unprecedented societal benefits. Lost in the shuffle of negative headlines is the reality that AI can change society for the better. According to the World Economic Forum, AI will create tens of millions of more jobs than it will destroy in the coming years. While Walmart CEO Doug McMillon is right to predict that AI will “change literally every job,” human beings are adaptable and resilient. This is especially true in an entrepreneurial society like ours.
Adaptability and resilience may not be as catchy as doom and gloom, but they have always been our hallmarks as Americans. As the co-founder of an AI-driven quantitative research platform, I know that AI can lead to unintended consequences that erode trust in the pursuit of truth—separating real from fake. But there is much more to the AI package, which now plays an integral role in delivering informative, high-quality research to people who need to learn about the world around them.
In recent years, AI has already disrupted the research industry. And that is a good thing: Today, we can deploy coordinated AI agents with a complete understanding of survey methodology, respondent context, and other key considerations. This allows researchers to replace traditionally expensive manual processes that are vulnerable to human error—such as 24/7 fielding operations—while expanding the pool of actionable information. Using AI, we can access over 100 million respondents across more than 75 countries worldwide, avoiding non-representative sample sizes. Beyond access, AI agents have given researchers the fastest turnaround times in history, allowing us to design, program, collect, and analyze research within hours, not weeks.
If Americans wish to understand the ins and outs of public opinion about a political event 24 hours ago, that is now possible. If people want to assess the popularity of Amazon’s new app update or Apple’s latest product launch within hours, we can with AI.
Good AI actors can also combat the bad ones. In an age of misinformation, disinformation, and outright fraud, we need AI on our side. “Fake science” is growing at an alarming rate. AI-powered survey fraud is rampant. According to a 2025 research paper, nearly all online survey respondents have the potential to be fraudulent, and bots are making the problem worse.
But the solution lies in AI detection, which surpasses the capabilities of the human eye. While there is a place for experts to double- and triple-check (yes, these jobs will still exist), we need AI to be able to spot language anomalies and other outliers that may suggest fake science.
In market research, political polling, and other industries, human experts can leverage new-age technologies as an overwhelming force for good, increasing access to the improved research we need to remain informed about the world around us. To quote Thomas Jefferson, “An informed citizenry is at the heart of a dynamic democracy.” So why wouldn’t we use every tool at our disposal to upgrade how we research and deliver data to people?
And that is just one example: Imagine the broad benefits of improved diagnostics, medical discovery, and treatment assisted by machine learning. AI could save millions of lives in the years ahead.
In any field, the private sector has an immense responsibility to operate in good faith, and root out the bad actors—AI-powered or not—who would do harm. The stakes are high in an increasingly distrustful society, but we should keep faith in a dynamic, innovative private sector that delivers not only breakthrough after breakthrough, but also upward mobility and economic progress. Because of AI disruption, we could see more progress than ever before, and there’s nothing scary about that.
Brian Tatum is co-founder of Outward Intelligence, the world’s first AI-native quantitative research platform.
