IBM: Barriers impact enterprise AI adoption but technology’s value is significant

Greater availability of development tools, the desire to reduce costs and automation are driving the enterprise adoption of AI but challenges such as employee skillsets, data complexity, and ethical concerns remain as barriers to widespread adoption if the technology.

Those were a few of the core findings in a new study published by IBM that surveyed over 8,500 IT professionals worldwide to determine the deployment of AI in enterprise – that is organizations with more than 1,000 employees.

The study found that about 42% of enterprise-scale organizations already have AI actively in use with 59% of those organizations planning to grow the use and  investment in the technology going forward.  Companies with 1,000 or fewer employees are less likely than larger companies to be adopting general AI and generative AI, the study found.

“More accessible AI tools, the drive for automation of key processes, and increasing amounts of AI embedded into off-the-shelf business applications are top factors driving the expansion of AI at the enterprise level,” said Rob Thomas, senior vice president of IBM Software wrote in a statement. “We see organizations leveraging AI for use cases where I believe the technology can most quickly have a profound impact like IT automation, digital labor, and customer care.”

AI is contributing to multiple facets of organizational operations, with IT process automation and marketing being the most popular applications. IT Professionals are at the forefront of AI usage at their companies and note the importance of being able to build and run AI projects wherever their data resides. Confidence in these capabilities is high, as most IT Professionals are confident that their company has the right tools to find data across the business, the study found.

Many of those companies already exploring or deploying AI have accelerated their roll-out of AI in the past two years, with ‘research and development’ and ‘workforce upskilling’ emerging as top investment priorities, IBM stated.  In the dynamic landscape of generative AI, companies are increasingly utilizing open source technology, with an even split in use between in-house and open-source technologies, IBM stated.