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Is the AI ready yet?
That seems to be the question on many business leaders’ minds as the second anniversary of ChatGPT’s fateful release nears. Indices attempting to gauge how companies have fared at reworking operations around generative AI have been piling up lately—and the verdict is mixed.
Some companies are more confident than their actual capabilities would indicate, many are finding AI falls short, and others are still organizing their IT infrastructure, these reports said. The data paint a picture of companies grappling with how to best integrate generative AI capabilities into their business as experts say companies are starting to feel pressure to move beyond experimentation.
Here’s a breakdown:
Moving backward: Cisco’s AI Readiness Index found that only 13% of large organizations are “ready to leverage AI and AI-powered technologies to their full potential,” a one-point drop from the same survey last year. The report was based on a survey of almost 8,000 business leaders at companies with 500 or more employees.
Cisco attributes the slipping momentum to culture and data challenges, as well as a lack of necessary talent and skills. And nearly half of companies report that “AI implementations have fallen short of expectations across top priorities.”
“Infrastructure readiness has notably declined, a concerning factor as companies say they anticipate significant increases in workloads,” the report said.
Stuck in place: Databricks surveyed 1,100 executives and other technical staffers and found that while 85% of companies use generative AI in at least one function, only 22% have faith that their IT architecture could support any more than what they currently have.
But only 37% of execs think their AI capabilities are “production-ready,” naming cost, skills, data quality, and governance as obstacles. And, again, talent issues were singled out.
Confidence gap: The vast majority (87%) of companies say their data infrastructure is “ready to build and deploy AI at scale,” but 70% of technical practitioners say they spend hours fixing data issues daily. That was one of the gaps Capital One identified in its survey of 4,000 business leaders.
The index also found a disconnect between how important leaders say data culture is to AI success and how many reported having strong data cultures (35%). And business leaders and tech leaders overwhelmingly agree on the importance of AI strategy, but only 53% of tech practitioners and 55% of leaders were “fully familiar” with their AI strategy.