ZDNET Highlights
- Gartner says 54% of I&O leaders are using AI to cut costs.
- 50% also cited budget constraints as their biggest AI obstacle.
- Industries are focusing less on AI hype, more on practical use.
The great improvement of AI is upon us.
After years of frantic racing to adopt AI — for uses that weren’t always entirely clear — some businesses and industry analysts are slowing down, taking a deep breath, and trying to be more systematic in how they use the technology. Part of this is to assess what is working across industries and what is challenging the routine.
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New one report This is a perfect example from Gartner. On Wednesday, the market research firm published the results of a survey that found more than half (54%) of infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders are using AI to reduce spend.
Automating routine operations may sound boring, but it can actually be the key to ROI – here’s how.
‘Stupid but functional’ is back
Conducted in the US, UK, India and Germany, the survey surveyed 253 I&O employees responsible for overseeing their respective employers’ IT ecosystems to learn how their organizations are using AI and the biggest challenges they faced in adopting the technology.
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Half of all respondents cited budget constraints as the biggest factor preventing their companies from incorporating AI, while slightly fewer (48%) said “integration difficulties” were their biggest obstacle. Conclusion Increasing evidence indicates that the majority of businesses using AI (up to 95% according to a recent MIT study) are not seeing significant returns on their investment in the technology.
However, a big finding from the MIT study was that the 5% or so of businesses that are making profits from the use of AI are using it to automate “back-office” – think: mundane and inconsequential – tasks, as opposed to the highly-visible use-cases that business leaders might be motivated to adopt to make it abundantly clear to customers and competitors that they are staying ahead of the technology curve.
The analysis also matches a report published earlier this month by Forrester, another market research firm, which argued that excessive AI hype is leading to a new era in which the technology will be used for more “dumb but functional” purposes.
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In its new report, Gartner urges I&O leaders to take a similar approach: Focus less on trying to sensationalize your use of AI, and start small, even if that sounds boring.
“Instead of chasing large AI projects, they should start with high-value, viable pilots and flexible upgrades,” Melanie Freese, director of Gartner Research, said in a statement accompanying the results. “For example, organizations can use GenAI for cloud cost management to automatically analyze cloud billing, resource usage, and infrastructure efficiency.”
Barriers to AI Adoption
Difficulties in adoption may be partly due to the lack of AI safety guardrails and the insecurities that arise from this. A recent survey conducted by data analytics company SAS and International Data Corporation (IDC) found that while the majority of respondents (65%) said their organizations are currently using AI, only 40% have actually taken concrete steps to implement security policies and guardrails to ensure their internal AI systems are trustworthy.
According to SAS and IDC, the rest were operating somewhere between uncertainty and unreliability, reducing their ability to get the most from their AI efforts.
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Another study from the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCA) published last month found that 43% of workers have shared sensitive information with AI, including financial and customer data.
