Last week, the US Senate held a hearing on artificial intelligence regulation, featuring testimonies from academics and Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei. The hearing came days after President Biden met with leaders from a handful of AI companies to discuss voluntary guardrails to ensure that new models are being developed safely and responsibly.

AI companies aren’t the only ones lawmakers are looking to regulate. This month, New York City’s law regulating AI in hiring went into effect, and various state governments are drafting similar bills to restrict how companies can deploy AI models.

What effect will this have on AI adoption at the firm level? Research gives us a clue: Last year, a group of researchers published a paper in The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization that set out to find how information about AI regulation impacts managers’ views on the ethical issues surrounding AI and their intent to adopt AI. Intent is the precursor to behavioral change, explains Yong Suk Lee, one of the study’s authors and an assistant professor of technology, economy, and global affairs at Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. In other words, managers’ feelings about AI will have a direct impact on their actions, facilitating or hindering AI adoption at the firm level.

We spoke with Lee for insights into how information about regulation impacts managers’ intent to adopt AI—and how companies can inform managers of AI pitfalls without discouraging them from using it altogether. Here are some key takeaways from our conversation and the research paper:

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