Delivering a better customer experience and improving employee performance are the leading drivers for AI adoption by more than half the large companies surveyed by IDC. The study highlights a direct correlation between AI adoption and superior business outcomes.
"Early adopters report an improvement of almost 25% in customer experience, accelerated rates of innovation, higher competitiveness, higher margins, and better employee experience with the roll out of AI solutions. Organizations worldwide are adopting AI in their business transformation journey, not just because they can but because they must to be agile, resilient, innovative, and able to scale," said Ritu Jyoti, program vice president, Artificial Intelligence Strategies.
Many paths to the same benefits
The survey also noted a divergence in how companies deploy AI solutions. IT automation, intelligent task/process automation, automated threat analysis and investigation, supply and logistics, automated customer service agents, and automated human resources are the top use cases where AI is being currently employed.
While automated customer services agents and automated human resources are a priority for larger companies (5000+ employees), IT automation is the priority for smaller and medium sized companies (<1000 employees).
Persistent challenges
Despite the benefits, deploying AI continues to present challenges, particularly with data. Lack of adequate volumes and quality of training data remains a significant development challenge.
Data security, governance, performance, and latency (transfer rate) are the top data integration challenges. Solution price, performance and scale are the top data management issues.
Enterprises report cost of the solution to be the number one challenge for implementing AI. As enterprises scale up their efforts, fragmented pricing across different services and pay-as-you-go pricing may present barriers to AI adoption.
Enterprises report spending around one third of their AI lifecycle time on data integration and data preparation vs. actual data science efforts, which is a big inhibitor to scaling AI adoption.
Large enterprises still struggle to apply deep learning and other machine learning technologies successfully. Businesses will need to embrace Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) – the compound of machine learning, development, and operations – to realize AI/ML at scale.
Trending
Trustworthy AI is fast becoming a business imperative. Fairness, explainability, robustness, data lineage, and transparency, including disclosures, are critical requirements that need to be addressed now.
Around 28% of the AI/ML initiatives have failed. Lack of staff with necessary expertise, lack of production-ready data, and lack of integrated development environment are reported as primary reasons for failure.
"An AI-ready data architecture, MLOps, and trustworthy AI are critical for realizing AI and Machine Learning at scale," added Jyoti.
