As the adoption of Artificial Intelligence continues to skyrocket, how are organizations working to control risk and stay on top of their competitors? Our 3rd annual survey demonstrates how the thinking of leaders is changing as applications become pervasive all across the company.
The Massive Edge of AI Adoption
Competitive Advantage Might Be Challenging to Maintain
The Artificial Intelligence adopters in our survey demonstrated complete confidence in their approach to AI and how they can take advantage—via competitive advantage, financial investment, technology implementation, and anticipated transformative impact.
The adopters firmly believe that Artificial Intelligence is vital to market leadership—today and in the future. 90% of our seasoned adopters acknowledge that AI is extremely crucial to their business today.
All adapters are incorporating critical AI technologies such as computer vision, deep learning, machine learning, and natural language processing at a brisk pace, with approximately universal adoption of the above-mentioned technologies anticipated in the upcoming year.
Adopters are investing loads of money, with more than 50% spending around US$20 million over the course of the last 12 months on AI-related talent and technology. 71% of adopters hope to boost their investment in the upcoming fiscal year by approximately 26%. All the seasoned Artificial Intelligence adopters are investing more and more with time, with around 68% having spent more than US$20 million over the past year. Seasoned adopters also typically achieve payback on their investments in a relatively shorter time.
It is crystal clear that adopters are committing massive amounts of financial and energy resources to their Artificial Intelligence implementations.
But what about the outcomes? Taking a thorough look at competitiveness as a measure, twenty-six percent of all respondents stated that the AI cutting-edge technologies allow them to develop a massive lead over their business rivals.
Succeeding in an AI Dominant era
Throughout the last few years, more and more businesses have begun to experiment with AI, taking their data-related capabilities to the next level, obtaining brand-new talent and technologies, and implementing Artificial Intelligence into their business procedures.
In the future, Artificial Intelligence will most probably become more and more dominant. It is anticipated that AI will soon become the new normal—it may be quicker than we could even imagine.
As a result, businesses that already possess an AI-powered edge must keep on distinguishing themselves. Companies that are yet to adopt cutting-edge AI technologies must start to accelerate efforts across their talent, processes, and products.
As all the late entrants start playing catch-up with all the leaders of the industry, AI adopters must concentrate on the following actions to keep their crisp:
- Pursue New Methods.
- Be A Wiser Consumer.
- Constantly Address Risks.
Pursue New Methods
In an AI dominant era, with capabilities conveniently available to everybody, companies must look to push the boundaries of what they can do with AI.
In this brand-new and potent wave of adoption, we determined that the majority seemed to focus more on enhancing what they have rather than developing something fresh. This doesn’t really come as a surprise, as AI adoption is offering several efficiency-related advantages—including automating procedures to allow people to concentrate on higher-value tasks, enhancing supply chains, utilizing predictive maintenance to diminish downtime, optimizing advertising purchasing and placement, and accelerating hiring.
Upon getting asked to list the two major benefits they were seeking from AI technologies, our participants’ primary choices were making procedures more efficient and improving current services and products.
All the executives that were surveyed suggested that their businesses are accomplishing these 2 results to a higher degree as compared to other AI objectives.
Be a Wiser Consumer
Hundreds and thousands of businesses are currently offering general, industry-specific, and function-specific AI solutions. This complicated vendor landscape is present alongside significant cloud providers that also provide a variety of AI-related technologies on their platforms.
This volume is not going anywhere. Particularly in the United States, Artificial Intelligence companies received a substantial amount of venture capital funding in the year 2019, achieving around US$18.5 billion.
All around the world, the trend is the same: From the year 2014 to late 2019, VCs made almost 15,000+ investments in Artificial Intelligence startups.
In this dynamic and rapidly-growing marketplace, businesses are required to opt for the correct AI-related technologies.
Highlighting this demand, we determined that all our surveyed AI adopters seemed to purchase their capabilities instead of building them.
Around fifty percent are purchasing more than they’re building, and the other thirty percent are utilizing a balanced mixture of purchasing and developing from scratch. Skilled and seasoned adopters are more likely to buy the AI systems they require as compared to Starters.
This clearly indicates that a lot of the companies might go through a period of experimentation and internal learning prior to realizing what’s necessary and then acquire that from the marketplace.
Constantly Address Risks
Despite strong enthusiasm for their AI efforts, adopters experience reservations too. As a matter of fact, they rank controlling AI-related risks as the primary challenge for their AI initiatives, tied with constant challenges of data management and integrating AI into their business’ procedures.
In addition to that, a worrying preparedness gap exists for adopters across a wide array of these potential strategic, operational, and ethical risks. It is estimated that more than half of the adopters report extreme and major concerns about these potential risks for their AI initiatives, while only 4 in 10 adopters rate their businesses as “fully prepared” to address them.
While cybersecurity is the most troublesome AI risk for adopters’, regulatory uncertainty, misuse of personal data, and AI failures are also some of the major areas of concern as well. With ample adopters feeling underprepared, these risks may impede their AI efforts.
And fifty-six percent agree that their business is halting the adoption of AI technologies because of the emerging risks, and the same proportion believes that negative public perceptions will stop or slow the adoption of some AI technologies.