IT leaders want AI but but accelerating development stirs fears: Report

New research from AMD has found that IT leaders are optimistic about the potential benefits of artificial intelligence, but are worried that their organizations are not prepared to implement the technology, whose development has accelerated with the rapid adavancement of generative AI.

The survey comprised responses from 2,500 IT leaders across the US, UK, Germany, France, and Japan, and sought to better understand the impact AI is having on the workplace.

“In the past six months alone there has been a marked advancement in AI tech. Wide availability of new, advanced generative AI tools has launched the technology into the mainstream, prompting many organizations to consider where AI fits in their existing digital transformation roadmaps and introducing a range of new concerns,” according to the report.

More than two-thirds of the IT leaders polled are now amassing budgets for AI project implementation, with the most frequently cited benefits including automated cybersecurity detection capabilities (70%), improving the efficiency of work models (68%), and an overall increase employee productivity (67%), the report said.

Furthermore, a majority of those surveyed expressed optimism about AI’s ability to improve their day-to-day work, with 78% believing AI will allow them to accomplish more tasks and 70% saying it will improve their work-life balance.

AI outpaces company preparedness to deal with it

However, the survey also showed that IT leaders think that AI development is outpacing organizational preparedness, causing them to express concern about their implementation roadmap and overall readiness.

Although 97% of IT leaders polled said they were familiar with AI, 52% of those surveyed said they had not experimented with the latest natural language processing applications, while 47% and 36% said the same for facial recognition systems and process automation software, respectively.

Forty-six percent of respondents said their organization isn’t ready to implement AI, with just 19% stating their company will prioritize AI within the next year. Forty-four percent of IT leaders surveyed said that AI would become a priority for their organization in between one and five years time.

Unsurprisingly, those leaders who said their organization would be prioritizing AI implementation this year were the most optimistic about the potential benefits of AI, with 75% of those expressing a positive view, believing that not investing would be a risk, as it could result in their organization falling behind their industry competitors.

“There is a benefit to being an early AI adopter,” said Matthew Unangst, senior director, commercial client and workstation at AMD, in comments posted alongside the research. “IT leaders are seeing the benefits of AI-enabled solutions, but their enterprises need to outline a more focused plan for implementation or risk falling behind.”