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The productive adoption rate of artificial intelligence for businesses has yet to live up to the hype surrounding the technology, with data privacy, regulation and IT infrastructure acting as major barriers to its widespread use, according to recent research.
The global survey of more than 300 business leaders by MIT Technology Review Insights and Australia-based telecommunications company Telstra revealed that only 9% of them made significant use of artificial intelligence.
While most leaders were optimistic about AI’s potential and expected to expand its use, currently even the early adopters of this technology have deployed it in limited business areas.
“There is a misconception about how easy it is to operate mature, enterprise-ready, artificial intelligence that is being created,” Stela Solar, inaugural director at Australia’s National Center for Artificial Intelligence, said in the research report.
Adopting it may require companies to “improve data quality and capability, privacy measures, AI skills, and implement secure and responsible AI governance across the organization,” he added.
“There are elements around application design, data connectivity and business processes, corporate policies and more that are still needed.”
Ambitions and headwinds
Most business leaders said they expect the number of business functions or general purposes for which genetic AI will be deployed to more than double by 2024.
Early adopters in 2023 had mostly developed the technology to automate low-value, repetitive tasks because they required less human supervision, said Chris Levanes, head of marketing for South Asia at Telstra.
85% of respondents expect to use genetic AI for these low-value tasks by 2024, with 77% expecting to apply it to customer service and 74% to strategic analysis.
Product innovation, supply chain logistics and sales were other areas for potential growth.
The report, which described these plans as “ambition and hubris,” cited several headwinds for the widespread deployment of genetic artificial intelligence in the coming year, especially computing resources and capabilities.
Fewer than 30% of respondents ranked their companies’ IT characteristics as conducive to the rapid adoption of genetic AI, with those deploying genetic AI having even less confidence in their IT infrastructure to support the new technology.
Meanwhile, 56% of respondents said that their IT investment budgets, in general, were a limiting factor for the development of genetic artificial intelligence.
77% of respondents cited regulations, compliance and data privacy as key barriers to rapid adoption of genetic AI – a major concern for the genetic AI ecosystem since the technology emerged in late 2022 after launch of Open AI. popular ChatGPT.
Technology has since led to numerous lawsuits related to the copyright of AI-generated material; Large companies have also faced sensitive information leaks and security issues due to its use.
Speaking to the media at the launch of the MIT report in Singapore on Monday, Laurence Liew, director of AI innovation at AI Singapore, reiterated that addressing these risks will require establishing established governance structures and security protocols for AI models.
“Companies need to ask do we have proper governance and are our internal documents properly segmented or secure?” Liew said, noting that businesses will want to avoid having AI models that can be tricked into revealing private information, such as employee salaries.
The ability to address these risks also relies on companies implementing strong internal cybersecurity measures, according to the report, with a slim majority of respondents saying their cybersecurity measures are “at best moderately capable” of supporting a productive AI deployment .
Other barriers to the adoption of genetic AI according to survey respondents included a lack of relevant genetic AI skills. Companies worry about not having the right talent internally and its unavailability in the market.
Disruptors against the disturbed
However, the survey reflected an overall positive sentiment about the future role of genetic AI in business. While six in 10 respondents expect genetic AI to significantly disrupt their industry in the next five years, 78% see it as a competitive opportunity. About 8% see it as a threat.
While building AI solutions that can responsibly handle large data sets and shape them for business is extremely difficult, it will soon be worth the investment, according to Geraldine Kor, South Asia managing director and head of global business at Telstra International.
“When successfully implemented, [generative AI] Proficiency will be a game-changer for most organizations and will distinguish leaders from followers,” he said in a statement about the survey on Monday.
According to a report by McKinsey released last year, genetic AI is expected to have its biggest impact in the sales, marketing, consumer operations, software development and R&D sectors and could add an estimated $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy .