As safety concerns over artificial intelligence mount, executives tasked with incorporating the technology into their businesses are emphasizing the importance of guardrails to address cybersecurity risks.

When it comes to healthcare, "we don't have the choice to say the decision is 99% good," said Pawan Verma, EVP and chief data and information officer at Cencora, on Tuesday at The Wall Street Journal's Technology Council Summit. "People quite literally die if a decision is not 100%."

With the rapid speed of AI integration raising the risk of something going wrong, Verma said he regularly tells employees at the pharmaceutical wholesale and distribution company to find a balance of fear and fascination to get familiar with the technology.

Deepa Soni, EVP and chief information officer at New York Life, stressed the value of taking the time to ensure security and governance are top of mind when infusing AI into mission-critical systems.

"We are maneuvering our processes to make sure we're disciplined in our approach," Soni said.

Still, executives realize there's a balance.

"We've got to move fast enough to capture the opportunity, but we can't move too fast. We've got to have the guardrails in place," said Anthony Moisant, chief information officer and chief security officer at Indeed. "We've got to have that rigor around cost transparency, around security, around privacy, around education."

Moisant said the most-common issues arise from human judgment: Indeed recognizes that it needs humans involved in the process of big decisions like designing AI systems. But people may not always recognize the consequences of some moves, like if a bad experimental decision ended up preventing someone from getting a job on the platform, he said.

That "would be a disaster for us," Moisant said.

Leaders in the AI industry have been increasingly sounding alarms over the need for regulation to guard against potential dangers from their own technology, which has been developing at a rapid pace. In a recent blog post, Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei called for the industry to slow down the development of cutting-edge tools.