Interest in AI Is Strong – and Justified
Artificial intelligence (AI) is giving rise to a broad wave of interest among IT and business decision-makers at levels seldom seen for new technologies.
According to a recent CIO MarketPulse survey, nearly all IT and business decision-makers are focusing efforts on AI — 89% of the survey respondents said interest in AI among organizational leaders is up year over year. And at large organizations, generative AI (GenAI) ranks first among all technologies for potential impact in the next year and is likely driving the surge of interest in AI overall.
There is reason to believe that this intense interest in artificial intelligence is not misplaced. Far from being a passing fad, AI is shaping up to be a major difference-maker that increases productivity across the organization: 72% of the survey respondents said productivity is the biggest benefit that AI could bring to their organization.
In addition to productivity, sustainability and cybersecurity are two of the top realms in which IT and business leaders expect to reap significant gains from AI. However, achieving those benefits requires more than just onboarding hard-to-find data scientists. Putting even the brightest minds to work won’t deliver results unless AI initiatives are built on a strong data foundation.
“Game-changing AI results can be achieved only when the underlying data is reliable,” says Rita Jackson, senior vice president of product marketing at OpenText. Machine learning (ML) algorithms will yield meaningful results only if the data they are processing is accurate, cleansed, and tagged with metadata, she explains.
The proliferation of data, including data from the internet of things (IoT), combined with the relentless increase in processing power, is opening up new possibilities for AI, according to Jeff Healey, vice president of Analytics and AI product marketing at OpenText. “Industries that create large amounts of IoT data can analyze it in real time to learn how machines are performing,” says Healey. That knowledge enables them to fine-tune operations to achieve unprecedented levels of performance and reliability, he adds.
With these benefits at stake, it should not come as a surprise that IT and business leaders are approaching AI with a rare sense of urgency. The main risk of not adopting AI, according to 78% of the survey respondents, is the inability to fully leverage those vast amounts of internal data. Failure to unlock the value of that data with AI is likely to leave organizations awash in the wake of competitors who are successful in reaping AI-enabled gains.
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Importantly, most organizations are realistic about their ability to embark on the sometimes daunting AI journey: 88% said they will need the help of an expert partner to make their AI initiative successful.
