AI Adoption and Usage

The following are links to articles and posts that talk about the adoption and usage of AI and ChatGPT.  The links are in the most recent date order.

ITPro. - IT leaders are less AI-ready than they were a year ago, says Cisco report

There are plenty of reasons. The biggest is infrastructure readiness, with gaps in compute, data center network performance, and cybersecurity. Only 21% of organizations have the necessary GPUs to meet current and future AI demands, and just three in ten have the capabilities to protect data in AI models with end--to--end encryption, security audits, continuous monitoring, and instant threat response.

ZDNET - AI transformation is the new digital transformation. Here's why that change matters

Almost two-thirds (64%) of CEOs believed 2023 was a breakthrough year for the power of AI. That was the year when many CIOs were busy telling me Gen AI remained at the exploratory stage and nowhere near production. It's a similar story now. Gen AI production stories are the rarity, not the rule.

The AI Memo - Making AI Adoption Less Uncomfortable—For All

In conversations with CIOs and VPs of IT, I hear that their companies already use AI—often developed and implemented by their IT teams. These are real business scenarios in which AI adds value or helps the business team do a task they were unable to do before, from supply chain optimization to product descriptions and document processing. But it’s not without struggles. Organizational dynamics, politics, and resistance to change come up more often as adoption barriers.

ITPro Today - The 4 Checkboxes of Scalable AI in the Enterprise

Boiling down the attributes of enterprises most capable of highly effective generative AI scaling, these businesses embed the talent, the efficiency, the infrastructure, and the cohesion required to launch and maintain generative AI initiatives beyond their initial phases. Here are your four non-negotiables.

TechBullion - Getting AI Right the First Time – How to Deploy the Right Tech Fit for Your Business

“Many organizations jump into AI without a clear objective,” he shares. “They risk investing in projects that never move from concept to production.” For Intelygenz, the mission is clear: design custom AI solutions that integrate effectively into a company’s workflow, delivering value from day one. This approach positions Intelygenz as an agile partner, ensuring clients don’t lose valuable time on ineffective solutions while their competitors advance. Chris believes this proactive, customized approach is key to unlocking tangible ROI from AI investments.

VentureBeat - How Sema4.ai is empowering business users to deploy AI agents in minutes

Six Fortune 2000 companies are piloting the platform in early proof-of-concept (PoC). Bearden explained that these partners are using agents to automate invoice processing, payment reconciliation, employee onboarding and regulatory compliance. In two of the PoCs, Sema4.ai’s platform is autonomously performing more than 80% of knowledge work tasks.

Diginomica - Josh Bersin on the ROI of AI in HR Read later

When the HR leader takes a step back and looks at all these changes, they say, ‘How are we going to reorganize the HR department to deal with this big technology change?’ We took all of this information we had about HR job titles and HR skills, and we put it into an AI system, and built a career planning tool for HR people.

AiThority - Team-GPT Raises $4.5Million to Discover and Deploy AI Use Cases in Enterprises

Team-GPT allows users within enterprises to interact with any AI model, organize prompts, and discover actionable AI use cases. This facilitates an easy integration of AI into business processes, empowering companies to decrease hiring needs and dramatically enhance productivity.

Data Science Central - Boosting government efficiency with valuable AI knowledge

For instance, a valuable use of AI is it can analyze spending patterns in procurement processes that can help decision-makers identify unnecessary expenditures. This can help governments save money. A study estimates that automating government processes could save between 96.7 million and 1.2 billion labor hours annually, translating to potential savings of $3.3 billion to $41.1 billion.

ZDNET - Sticker shock: Are enterprises growing disillusioned with AI?

Hitting a "data wall": The main issue enterprises are running up against is "not because the generative AI technology is bad, but because their data's bad," he explained. The challenge is "there's no easy fix for this, you're going to have to stop what you're doing, loop back, and fix your data. For many of these organizations, that particular problem hasn't been addressed for the last 20 or 30 years.

TechRepublic - AI Market Trends: Key Insights & How Enterprises Should Adapt

Smith said one dangerous path is for enterprises to test every use case for AI. Instead, he said organisations should prioritise only those use cases that are most important for the business to pursue today. While some business use cases might be effective, they may also be much cheaper to do when the cost of an AI token decreases, so organisations would be better off waiting in some cases.

ZDNET - Organizations face mounting pressure to accelerate AI plans, despite lack of ROI

Across the Asia-Pacific, 98% of respondents expressed an increased urgency to deploy AI over the past year, with 49% pointing to their CEO and leadership team as the main source of pressure. Another 40% said their middle management was feeling pushed to adopt AI, while 36% cited their board of directors.

BigDATAWire - ‘Playtime is Over’ for GenAI: NTT DATA Research Shows Organizations Shifting From Experiments to Investments

Ninety-six percent of respondents are considering how GenAI can streamline future employee workflows and support processes. However, 67% of respondents said their employees lack the necessary skills to work with GenAI. About half are planning employee education and training to increase GenAI adoption.

eWeek - AI Agents Set to Transform Customer Experience Landscapes

It’s difficult to estimate the number of ways AI agents can transform a business, and more are being developed almost daily. To date, some of the most common applications include contact centers, financial applications, data collection and analysis, task and project management, personal assistance, and more.

Diginomica - Are you over the AI hype yet? Desk workers are. Slack global research exposes harsh realities of workforce adoption

Well, up to a point perhaps, but there are still complications and not-spoken-enough realities to be factored in, not least a(nother) gap between management and worker attitudes. While desk workers on the frontline have cooled towards AI, their bosses - and budget holders - have not. Some 99% of execs polled say they plan to invest in AI this year, while 97% still feel some urgency to incorporate generative AI into business operations.

Microsoft - How real-world businesses are transforming with AI

Generative AI is revolutionizing innovation by speeding up creative processes and product development. It’s helping companies come up with new ideas, design prototypes, and iterate quickly, cutting down the time it takes to get to market. In the automotive industry, it’s designing more efficient vehicles, while in pharmaceuticals, it’s crafting new drug molecules, slashing years off R&D times. In education, it transforms how students learn and achieve their goals. Here are more examples of how companies are embracing generative AI to shape the future of innovation.

ZDNET - Businesses must reinvent themselves in the age of agentic AI

The three engineering principles for building a modern, adaptable digital core are Architect with intent, Connect the dots, and Thrive with ecosystems. Leading companies building a reinvention-ready digital core adopt these ACT principles two times more than others.

TechTalks - How to choose the first machine learning project for your organization

Start with tasks where you already have a good amount of data, preferably clean and structured in a data warehouse. If not, look for areas where you have a lot of unstructured documents that hold a lot of value. In many cases, you can get a lot of value from raw documents or get them ready with minimal annotation.

SiliconANGLE - Agentic AI: Exploring its scope, applicable use cases and current state

“We have those kinds of applications that are emerging today, many of which will be AI agent-based,” he said. “Industrial automation, smart manufacturing, predictive maintenance, supply chain optimization — I use that personally myself. Anything that can benefit from the utilization of an intelligent agent that’s already able to carry out a certain narrow set of duties, that’s really what it’s good at.”

AiThority - AI Integration in SMBs: Balancing Fear and FOMO

SMBs are navigating challenges with AI. In the U.K., top concerns are cost (35%), lack of skilled staff (32%), and integration issues (29%), while in the U.S., tech failure (29%), employee resistance (28%), and high costs (27%) lead. Sectors like retail, healthcare, and manufacturing are especially wary, with 42% of retail SMBs expressing fear over AI’s “unknown future.”

Evidently AI - ML and LLM system design: 500 case studies to learn from

How do companies like Netflix, Airbnb, and Doordash apply AI to improve their products and processes? We put together a database of 500 case studies from 100+ companies that share practical ML use cases, including applications built with LLMs and Generative AI, and learnings from designing ML and LLM systems.

The Augmented Advantage - Why You Should Stop Looking for AI Use Cases

Even if their AI system worked flawlessly (it didn't), they'd need ~2.5 years just to break even. Meanwhile, they had other processes leaking $50,000 per month that could have been fixed with simple AI augmentation.

Here's a simple rule I use with my clients: If a business problem isn't worth at least $10,000 per month in value (either cost savings or additional revenue), it's probably not worth building an AI solution for.

Forbes - 8 Ways To Generate ROI From AI (By Entrepreneurs Actually Doing It)

I talked to entrepreneurs using AI right now. Not theorizing about it, not planning to use it someday, but getting real ROI today. Their results paint a clear picture. AI tools aren't just cutting costs, they're fundamentally changing how businesses operate and grow.

CognitivePath - Understanding AI Agent Hype: Promises versus Potential

The potential for AI agents is excellent. In reviewing some of the initial new AI agent packages that are out there, most initial offerings are domain-specific, acting within very confined task paths such as customer response agents or sales development assistants embedded in CRMs. Narrow AI scoping is expected as enterprise software platforms will create somewhat customizable agents that serve the broadest swath of their customers possible.

VentureBeat - Knowledge workers are leaning on generative AI as their workloads mount

A State of AI at Work report from Asana found that only 31% of companies have a formal AI strategy in place, and that “dangerous divides exist between executives and individual contributors in terms of AI enthusiasm, adoption and perceived benefits”.

MIT Technology Review - How ChatGPT search paves the way for AI agents

In the next year, Godemont says, he expects the adoption of AI for customer support and other assistant-based tasks to grow. However, he says that it can be hard to predict how people will adopt and use OpenAI’s technology.

Diginomica - Accenture - companies need to think about generative AI for revenue growth, not just cost reduction

The theory being put forward by Accenture is that the companies that are performing the best when it comes to productivity are not just using technology and knowledge within their organization to drive out costs - viewing all productivity endeavors through the lens of cost - but are rather are thinking about how technology and knowledge can be used to drive revenue growth. This thinking, the research argues, becomes even more critical with the adoption of generative AI, which can have a multiplier effect.

GeekWire - Column: To navigate the promise and peril of AI, resist the urge to fall into extreme narratives

It’s okay not to have everything figured out. This technology is still new, and it’s evolving fast. But if we stay open-minded, set smart guardrails, and ensure fair treatment for everyone involved, I think we can unlock AI’s potential without losing what makes us human.

InfoWorld - Cloud providers make bank with genAI while projects fail

You don’t need to look far for the disappointing stats. Gartner estimates that 85% of AI implementations fall short of expectations or aren’t completed. I see the same thing in my practice: Projects start and then stop, many never to be resurrected. You can google all the other reports of AI bad news; the general trend is that companies are good at spending money but bad at building and deploying AI.

Forbes - How To Get Started In AI Even If You Don't Have Technical Skills

Based on recent headlines, you might be convinced you’re light-years behind if your company hasn’t already integrated AI into its processes. According to a recent survey from EY, the speed of AI adoption is one of the biggest triggers for AI anxiety. In that same survey, polling 1,000 Americans with desk jobs, 90% said that their organization uses at least one AI technology, with Gen AI topping the list.

TechRepublic - Thoughtworks Reports Rapid Growth in AI Tools for Software Dev

According to the report, rapid adoption of AI tools is starting to create antipatterns — or bad patterns throughout the industry that are leading to poor outcomes for organisations. In the case of coding-assistance tools, a key antipattern that has emerged is a reliance on coding-assistance suggestions by AI tools.

Forbes - AI In Healthcare—Delivering Value Today And In The Future

Diagnostics: AI algorithms are enhancing diagnostic accuracy and efficiency. For instance, Google Cloud Healthcare is enhancing diagnostic accuracy and speed to identify potential treatments and improve patient outcomes. Butterfly Network's handheld ultrasound device, powered by AI, enables point-of-care imaging, making early diagnosis more accessible.

FedScoop - OpenAI further expands its generative AI work with the federal government

On the defense side, the company is entering a limited ChatGPT Enterprise partnership with the Air Force Research Laboratory, which does research and development work for the military service. Similar to USAID’s application of the technology, the partnership will focus on using generative AI to reduce administrative burdens and increase efficiency, experimenting with using the technology to improve access to internal resources and basic coding, for instance.

The FuturAI - Adapt or Perish: Why AI Agents Are No Longer Optional for Business Survival

As the underlying AI continues to improve at breathtaking speed, the set of human activities that can be handed off to agents will rapidly grow. How long will it be before an agentic system can fully automate the work of a lawyer? An investigative journalist? A policymaker? A venture capitalist? An AI researcher?

Diginomica - What should enterprises build with agentic AI?

This does sound like an advance, and tech vendors who believe they've got there first with this new class of AI-fueled agents are very excited to see their customers take them on board. But what will enterprises actually do with agentic AI that moves their organizations forward? What are the unmentioned gotchas they need to be wary of? And how soon will agentic AI be superseded in turn by the next new, new thing?

aiThority - The AI Landscape: Technology Stack and Challenges

As we stand in the early stages of the AI revolution, it’s clear that the challenges we face today are just the beginning. The second and third-order effects of widespread AI adoption are yet to be fully understood or experienced. However, this uncertainty also allows the global community of practitioners, researchers, and policymakers to unite.

BigDataWire - ServiceNow Unveils New Research on Government Organizations Setting the Pace for AI-Driven Transformation

“This report reinforces that leading governments are already reaping the benefits of AI through accelerated service delivery, citizen experience, and employee productivity. Whether you’re a Pacesetter or still in the beginning stages of a digital journey, these findings show that the future is promising for those willing to embrace AI.”

AiThority - Bust through the Hype and Build Practical AI Solutions that Drive Rapid, Measurable Productivity for Business

While not every AI solution is ready for immediate enterprise-wide use, especially in complex IT environments with numerous data sources, most businesses can find targeted, low-risk high-reward applications where AI adds immediate value.

Diginomica - Prepare for talking AI documents and the AI factory

Organizations are awash with content, and much of it only acts as a repository of information - loan terms or health records, which, in turn, need storage and archiving technology as well as applications for managing content. Bates believes AI within documents is bringing the enterprise content management (ECM) sector back to life as AI relies on extracting and acting on metadata, the very essence of ECM.

Information Week - It Takes a (C-Suite) Village to Implement AI

The stakes are high: globally, poor customer experiences cost organizations $3.7 trillion annually — an increase of $600 billion from last year. According to our 2024 AI and Customer Service Index, only 50% of people believe AI has improved service in recent years. As we look ahead to 2025, it’s clear that customer service is still broken, and the traditional approaches aren’t delivering. New answers are needed, and those answers lie in the powerful fusion of data, AI and humans.

VentureBeat - 5 ways to overcome the barriers of AI infrastructure deployments

The Harvard Business Review estimates the failure rate is as high as 80% — about twice the rate of other corporate IT project failures. One of the top barriers preventing successful AI deployments is limited AI skills and expertise. In fact, 9 out of 10 organizations suffer from a shortage of IT skills, which exposes execution gaps in AI system-design, deployment and ongoing cluster management.

Computerworld - Meta, Apple say the quiet part out loud: The genAI emperor has no clothes

Amidst the mountains of vendor cheerleading for generative AI efforts, often amplified by enterprise board members, skeptical CIOs tend to feel outnumbered. But their cynical worries may now have some company, in the form of a report from Apple and an interview from Meta — both of which raise serious questions about whether genAI can actually do much of what its backers claim.

Tom's Hardware - Linus Torvalds reckons AI is ‘90% marketing and 10% reality’

On a more positive note, Torvalds reckons there is change afoot. “In five years, things will change, and at that point we’ll see what AI is getting used every day for real workloads.” But it now seems fitting to remind readers that this isn’t the first instance of an IT industry heavyweight asking about the validity of the AI industry. Just a week ago, we reported on the CEO of Baidu voicing an even more pessimistic opinion – that the AI bubble would burst and that just 1% of companies would continue to pick up the pieces after the predicted ‘pop.’

Fortune - Researchers disagree about the speed of gen AI adoption. But one thing’s clear: The tech is increasingly everywhere

The 40% figure, he pointed out, would include someone who simply asked ChatGPT to write a limerick once in the last month. The paper actually said only 0.5%-3.5% of work hours involved generative AI assistance—and only 24% of workers used it once in the last week prior to being surveyed, and only one in nine used it every workday.

The Globe and Mail - What companies must consider when implementing AI solutions

Potential enterprise AI benefits include increased efficiency, reduced ‘grunt work’ so employees can focus on higher-order activities, and enabling data processing at scale. Pitfalls are also a factor. How do you manage risk? How do you handle governance? How do you use AI as a tool to maximize human potential rather than replace it?

Information Week - 7 Things That Need to Happen to Make GenAI Useful to Business

Losing interest in more models and features sounds counterintuitive but it actually isn’t. Organizations need time to learn the models and features that exist now to see clearly how they can be leveraged. The rush to constantly upgrade before you get your bearings borders on insanity from a purely business, capture- the-ROI perspective.

Blocks & Files - Wharton Business School study claims enterprises buying into Gen AI

The surveyed businesses are now actively using Gen AI across multiple functions, such as coding, data analysis, idea generation, brainstorming, content creation, and legal contract generation. Nearly half of organizations are hiring Chief AI Officers (CAIOs) to lead strategic initiatives. Such CAIOs are now in 46 percent of companies. Challenges around accuracy, privacy, team integration, and ethics persist, though these concerns have slightly eased compared to last year.

VentureBeat - Gartner predicts AI agents will transform work, but disillusionment is growing

There are a few fundamental reasons for this, he explained. First, VCs have funded “an enormous amount of startups” — but they have still grossly underestimated the amount of money startups need to be successful. Also, many startups have “very flimsy competitive moats,” essentially serving as a wrapper on top of a model that doesn’t offer much differentiation.

SiliconANGLE - Generative AI adoption sets the table for AI ROI

Moreover, 97% of leading gen AI adopters report that they’re achieving tangible benefits from their deployments. Adoption of gen AI is relentlessly on the rise and nearly two years in, is poised to begin throwing off enough value that it will heighten a mandate to apply AI to drive business results. As such, we believe that as we exit Q4 into 2025, the demand for AI solutions will continue to occupy the headspace of business technology pros and AI momentum will maintain its accelerated pace.

VentureBeat - Enterprise AI moves from ‘experiment’ to ‘essential,’ spending jumps 130%

The remaining investment is distributed across training and upskilling the existing workforce, onboarding new employees and consulting services. While much of the hype and news in generative AI in 2024 has been about the technology, that’s not the differentiator for many enterprises at this point.

CDO Trends - From Sandbox to Center Stage: AI Moves Towards Broad Adoption in Financial Services

On the buy-side, AI is the top tech priority in 2024, moving beyond the hype and into broader adoption. 64% of respondents plan to launch customer-facing services using GenAI in 2024 before shifting toward externally focused use cases. Capital markets firms are now uncovering the most salient use cases to embed in business and operational models while continuing to navigate their own internal risk postures and concerns. The buy-side strategically invests to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance accuracy and compliance.

AiThority - Wealth Management Firms Expected to More Than Double AI Budgets: Wipro Survey

All surveyed firms indicate that they have started adopting AI in different parts of their operations. However, less than half (44 percent) say they are using AI extensively. That said, these extensive users report tangible benefits, with 73 percent experiencing significant competitive advantage because of AI adoption. These extensive users also lead the pack in leveraging AI to enhance client engagement, with 65 percent expecting significant AI-driven changes in client relationship management over the next 1-2 years.

Diginomica - Four CDOs explain how they make Artificial Intelligence work for their business

JP Morgan Chase is focused on building cloud-based foundations that help the firm develop AI-enabled products safely and securely. Jain recognizes the excitement around generative AI and says prioritization around use cases is crucial. The firm has a “quad model”, where product, data, technology and design work hand in hand to deliver high-quality solution

Forbes - Tech Budget Pressures Highlight Growing AI Hype Gap

AI is all the rage, and it’s driven up excitement in the tech markets. But if you are a tech executive, it’s also causing headaches. There might be pressure on you to allocate money to unproven generative AI projects, and that means squeezing money out of the bread-and-butter tech budget.

VentureBeat - LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman unveils ‘super agency’ vision at TED AI conference, takes subtle shot at Elon Musk

“Humans not using AI will be replaced by humans using AI,” Hoffman predicted, arguing that the real divide won’t be between humans and machines, but between those who embrace AI’s capabilities and those who don’t.

CIO - IT pros: One-third of AI projects just for show

“This can lead to a dangerous cycle where decision-makers become skeptical of AI’s potential, reducing future investment,” Nagaswamy says. “The long-term impact is even more worrying — companies risk falling behind competitors who are implementing AI strategically. Their teams miss out on crucial learning experiences, leaving them ill-equipped to handle genuine AI deployments down the road.”

Forbes - In 2025, There Are No Shortcuts To AI Success

The next big piece of emerging tech in the world of AI is agentic AI, but enterprises with ambitions to build advanced agentic architectures themselves will meet significant hurdles. The challenge is that these architectures are convoluted, requiring diverse and multiple models, sophisticated retrieval-augmented generation stacks, advanced data architectures, and niche expertise. Mature companies will recognize these limitations and opt to collaborate with AI service providers and systems integrators, leveraging their expertise to build cutting-edge agentic solutions.

VentureBeat - AI agents fed by process intelligence power the next gen of enterprise AI performance

According to Gartner, the global market for process mining software grew 40% in 2023. Worldwide sales for process automation are expected to reach $26 billion by 2027. Nearly 90% of corporate leaders surveyed by HFS Research plan to increase investments in process intelligence. A big part of the appeal, Gartner concludes: “Generative AI helps organizations use process mining to uncover hidden patterns, optimize operations and make informed decisions.”

FedScoop - National Archives getting a big boost from AI to transform its search capabilities

NARA’s CTO says the agency has gone all in on the technology, with pilots on auto-filling metadata, PII redaction, FOIA processing and more.

TechTarget - Computer Weekly - Dell CTO: Enterprise AI poised to take off in 2025

One key difference, according to Roese, is that enterprises are primarily focused on inference – running data through existing models – rather than training their own models. This will require a different infrastructure approach: one that’s distributed, optimised for inference and potentially extending to the edge. “We’ve seen a maturing of the enterprise market in the last six months,” Roese observed, pointing to the rise of off-the-shelf AI tools and capabilities aimed at enterprises, which are generally better at consuming than producing technology.

ZDNET - The secret to successful digital initiatives is pretty simple, according to Gartner

"They define a well-scoped, impactful problem and use gen AI to solve [it], and it's easy to measure success and ROI. The most successful business cases identify how to solve a problem that the business already cares deeply about and [will] deliver additional value to customers."

VentureBeat - Generative AI grows 17% in 2024, but data quality plummets: Key findings from Appen’s State of AI Report

“Generative AI outputs are more diverse, unpredictable, and subjective, making it harder to define and measure success,” Chen told VentureBeat. “To achieve enterprise-ready AI, models must be customized with high-quality data tailored to specific use cases.”

Computerworld - GenAI surges in law firms: Will it spell the end of the billable hour?

For more than a decade, law firms have been using machine learning and artificial intelligence tools to aid the discovery process, helping them hunt down paper trails and digital content alike. But it wasn’t until the arrival two years ago of OpenAI’s generative AI (genAI) conversational chatbot, ChatGPT, that the technology became common and easy enough to use that even first-year associates straight out of law school could rely on it for electronic discovery (eDiscovery).

ZDNET - Generative AI doesn't have to be a power hog after all

But increasingly, businesses are finding that building small custom models doesn't require massive banks of powerful systems (with some companies I've heard from building their models on a single engineer's laptop) and that power consumption can be kept to a minimum. In fact, when we asked what technologies businesses were purchasing to support their AI initiatives, GPUs had dropped to 4th place while increased storage capacity and hybrid cloud capabilities topped the list.

Information Week - Gartner Keynote Bites into AI ‘Sandwich’

They also talked about the different races going on to adopt GenAI. It’s important to understand, they said, that the vendor race happening should be separated from their own race to implement AI technologies. CIOs are bearing most of the burden of rapid AI innovation expectations: A Gartner survey showed 57% of CIOs were tasked with creating an AI strategy.

Big Data Wire - Riverbed Finds Financial Services Leading AI Readiness Despite Gaps

At the same time, Financial Services decision-makers are also more assured in the practical benefits of AI than most, with 96% of respondents believing it provides their business a competitive advantage. Financial organizations are vying for an edge against digital-native startups – which demands a strategic and practical approach to AI that reduces costs, increases efficiency, offers bespoke services, and mitigates customer risk.

InfoWorld - AI stagnation: The gap between AI investment and AI adoption

This significant talent shortage means that enterprises cannot implement AI technologies. This stifles innovation. This disconnect between high levels of investment and the slowing pace of AI adoption underscores the need for a more strategic approach, bridging the gap between technological advancements and practical applications. This is what it will take to get us out of the AI stagnation intersection.

CIO - CIOs under pressure to deliver AI outcomes faster

The enterprise landscape is littered with Version 1.0 generative AI proof of concept projects that did not materialize into business value and have been dumped. While the industry remains in the early stages of uncovering and implementing AI use cases into business workflows, the blueprint for success remains elusive for many CIOs.

Big Data Wire - Hammerspace Report Reveals New Enterprise Uses for GPUs Beyond AI

“The next wave of innovation is being driven by how companies activate their unstructured data,” said David Flynn, founder and CEO of Hammerspace. “Our research shows that the GPUs many enterprises originally purchased for AI projects are becoming the Swiss Army knife of data processing. This infrastructure is unlocking value in ways we never expected across various sectors.”

Diginomica - AI dystopia? Not if I can help it, says self-confessed AI optimist Zack Kass

Kass says a recent study he took part in found there's currently a 12% profit margin improvement by companies meaningfully adopting AI. He predicts the beginning of an incredible boom cycle as companies introduce AI into their systems, both on a cost basis and a revenue basis, as the most important trend he is currently tracking is the rapid decline in cost of this technology.

AiThority - Why Is AI Washing Harmful to the AI Industry?

Similarly, companies may claim that their onboarding process uses AI, but only a small element, like document recognition, might be powered by AI. In reality, most of the process relies on traditional methods with minimal AI integration. Also, AI’s potential in credit scoring seems excellent — it can help with more detailed and sophisticated big data analysis. However, it is again often a conventional data-based automation with minimal ML usage.

Forbes - How You Can Make Money With AI: Real Opportunities You Can Tap Into

Creating an app sounds like a big task, but platforms like Microsoft Azure and IBM Watson allow small teams—or individuals—to build AI-powered apps. Entrepreneurs are developing everything from chatbots for customer service to tools that help with scheduling and task management. If you spot a problem that an app can solve, there’s a good chance you can build a solution with AI.

FedScoop - For Customs and Border Protection, AI has been a ‘game-changer’

Alalasundaram pointed specifically to Google’s Vertex AI system, which allows CBP staffers to “search across disparate data sources” and integrate that data into one entity. “It’s an absolute game-changer,” he said.

ZDNET - AI is a $9-trillion market, and enterprises have barely begun to touch it

"Traditional robotic process automation, embodied by UiPath, has struggled with high set-up costs, brittle execution, and burdensome maintenance," they said. "Two novel approaches, FlowMind (JP Morgan) and ECLAIR (Stanford), use foundation models to address these limitations."

Dell - AI Projects Only Matter If They Move the Needle

Business and IT stakeholders also examine the implementation feasibility of each use case. Some of the key categories of feasibility are data availability and readiness, degree of AI model tuning, processes and people and a capable platform.

Diginomica - Grounding AI in reality - Qlik isn't looking through rose-tinted glasses

Qlik's study found that 58% of leaders are trying to secure investment in AI technologies, but the rush to embrace AI can be fraught with missteps. As some organizations have discovered to their public embarrassment, launching AI projects without a clear roadmap or understanding of their long-term impact can lead to costly failures. More than 30% of early AI adopters have seen over 50 AI projects fail after the development stage.

FedScoop - VA staffers are piloting two chatbots for internal use

“The reception has been extremely positive, especially for the basic chat interface,” Yuen said. “I think people are just super excited to have something that makes their daily life a little bit easier. … For the [smaller] tool, I think there’s a little bit more feedback about how they wish that it had a bit more features and we are working toward building some of those features.”

Computerworld - Here’s how Cleary Gottlieb law firm uses genAI for pre-trial discovery and more

For more than a decade, law firms have been using machine learning and artificial intelligence tools to help them hunt down paper trails and digital documents. But it wasn’t until the arrival two years ago of OpenAI’s generative AI (genAI) conversational chatbot, ChatGPT, that the technology became easy enough to use that even first-year associates straight out of law school could rely on it for electronic discovery (eDiscovery).

Diginomica - digibyte - (welcome) CIO candor around AI enterprise expectations

CIOs also appear aware that the AI hype cycle has washed over everyone in the business, thanks mainly to the impact of generative AI at a consumer level, and as such, expectation management is needed, with CIOs citing a mismatch between departments when it comes to AI. Functional areas such as customer service may well be among the most frequently cited as having most potential AI use cases today, but they are also potentially among the least prepared for the rollout of the technology in practice.

Computerworld - How Ernst & Young’s AI platform is ‘radically’ reshaping operations

Even so, the company’s executive leadership insists it’s not handing off all of its business functions and operations to an AI proxy and that humans remain at the center of innovation and development. Looking to the future, EY sees the next evolution as artificial general intelligence (AGI) — a neural network that will be able to think for itself and capable of performing any intellectual task a human can at that point it will become a “strategic partner shifting the focus from task automation to true collaboration between humans and machines,” according to Beatriz Sanz Saiz, EY global consulting data and AI leader.

Forbes - The Increasing Use Of AI In Education

AI is particularly useful in “hyperpersonalizing” education, in which we can treat each individual as an individual and provide a deeply personalized learning experience. This personalized approach is helping students learn at their own pace, addressing their individual strengths and weaknesses, rephrasing or reframing content so that it can be better understood, and helping learners focus on areas where they need or want to dive deeper.

FedScoop - Data, talent, funding among top barriers for federal agency AI implementation

A FedScoop analysis of 29 of those documents found that data readiness and access to quality data, a dearth of knowledge about AI and talent with specific expertise, and finite funding levels were among the most common challenges that agencies reported. Agencies also disclosed obstacles when it comes to their IT infrastructure, limitations in government-ready tools, and testing and evaluation challenges, among other issues.

The Wall Street Journal - Companies Had Fun Experimenting With AI. Now They Have to Show the Returns.

“This is a year where you have to be expecting business results,” Brynjolfsson said, adding that the technology is mature enough to deliver them. “This is a time when you should be getting benefits, and hope that your competitors are just playing around and experimenting.”

ZDNET - Why agentic AI is the new electricity, and nearly 80% of business leaders are afraid of the dark

The survey revealed that 71% of respondents said AI agents would increase workflow automation, 64% said they'd improve customer service and satisfaction, and 57% said the potential productivity improvements outweighed the risks. The biggest use case (75% of respondents) for agentic artificial intelligence (AI) was in software development -- to generate, evaluate, and rewrite code.

Diginomica - FORWARD 2024 - the future of enterprise AI and agentic automation

Those businesses that capture these advantages with AI and automation now are best positioned to harness the next evolution in AI with AI agents, also known as agentic automation. Agentic automation is an evolutionary leap from robotic process automation that combines robots, agents, and humans to deliver AI transformation enterprise wide. But for many enterprises, agentic AI is a new buzzword entirely – and a new set of questions are on the table.

ITPro Today - Roulette or Rigor? Don’t Rely on Luck With Generative AI

As the generative AI hype subsides, some early adopters have already seen compelling business value in process automation, customer support, and IT operations. However, as with any groundbreaking technology, the implementation of generative AI is fraught with challenges. So, what have successful organizations done differently? Instead of playing roulette with AI, they managed their deployments thoughtfully and thoroughly, steering clear of costly errors and missed opportunities.

Information Week - Avoiding GenAI Disillusionment to Make Magic in the Cloud

Some believe cloud-based GenAI is not cost-effective because it’s less expensive to deploy the necessary high-end processing and networking on-premises. However, operating GenAI on-premises requires GPUs, which are both hard to find and expensive, and you need to run workloads 24x7 at a 90% resource utilization. This isn’t effective for organizations that want, and financially need, to develop incrementally

SiliconANGLE - Desperately seeking AI ROI as IT budgets tighten

The implication is that AI investments are going to have to start throwing off positive cash flow or business line managers will be under pressure. That pressure will ripple through the organization and cause a potential backlash. The reality is the super-high-value AI projects will take many more months or even years to pay super large dividends at most companies. Though technology progresses quickly, organizations’ ability to absorb it broadly is not trivial. As such, the macro picture won’t see the effects of AI for 12 to 18 months at least and there could be some pain in the meantime.

Information Week - The Great Accelerator: Why Generative AI Is Primed for Long-Term Impact

What’s further, the modernization of legacy applications and platforms has garnered elevated interest in generative AI. More and more enterprises are seeking generative AI-assisted modernization that is more secure than traditional methods and are looking to accelerate those initiatives. Because of reduced human dependency, these generative AI models have the vast ability to identify vulnerabilities and process threat incidents faster, thus enhancing the overall accuracy of organizational operations.  

VentureBeat - Skeptical about AI? It’s normal (and healthy)

Conversely, though, a recent study predicts that by the end of 2025, at least 30% of generative AI projects will be abandoned after the proof-of-concept stage, and in another report “by some estimates more than 80% of AI projects fail — twice the rate of IT projects that do not involve AI”.

Forbes - The Game-Changing Impact Of Generative AI On The Enterprise

First and foremost is platform enablement. Organizations need to carefully consider their technology choices and how they'll build their overall AI environment. This isn't just about selecting the right software; it's about creating an ecosystem that can support and scale AI initiatives across the enterprise. Brier emphasizes that this decision is more complex than simply choosing between vendors. Companies must consider factors such as integration capabilities, scalability, and alignment with existing IT infrastructure.

AiThority - AI and Its Biggest Myths: What the Future Holds

It’s worth taking a moment to acknowledge the significant impact AI is having across various industries. In e-learning, for example, companies like Coursera and Duolingo are using it to create more personalized learning experiences. AI algorithms can analyze how users interact with content and then tailor future lessons to their specific needs and interests. This kind of personalization is something that traditional education methods often struggle to achieve with outdated one-size-fits-all content.

eWeek - 13 Generative AI Examples (2024): Transforming Work and Play

One industry that seems nearly synonymous with AI is advertising and marketing, especially when it comes to digital marketing. Many marketers feel AI can reduce the amount of time spent on manual tasks to make room for enhanced creativity. As a result, the advertising and marketing sectors are experiencing a paradigm shift with the integration of generative AI. They are seeing unprecedented levels of personalization, content creation, and customer engagement.

Diginomica - Workday Rising 2024 - customers reveal early lessons from gen AI in action

Sanchez acknowledged that AI/automation projects can stoke internal fears of job loss. DataStax has an instructive way to handle this: address the future of work at head-on, and: give employees a flavor for new roles they could take on. Some companies are doing a poor job of communicating what AI means to them

eWeek - 6 Generative AI Use Cases (2024): Real-World Industry Solutions

Generative AI technologies are proving invaluable in healthcare, aiding in everything from administrative tasks to drug discovery. By using GenAI, healthcare professionals can improve daily operations, enhance patient care, and accelerate research. Some of the most common GenAI tools for healthcare include Paige, Insilico Medicine, and Iambic.

AIThority - TestRail Releases Landmark Report on AI’s Role in Quality Assurance

Based on the QA industry’s first AI-focused research survey, this comprehensive report draws on insights from over 1,000 QA professionals and aims to cut through the hype surrounding artificial intelligence, offering a clear and accurate picture of how QA teams are adopting, planning for, and responding to AI technology.

ZDNET - Bank of America survey predicts massive AI lift to corporate profits

Software is the industry that may see the greatest product margin expansion (5.2%) due to enterprise Gen AI, followed by semiconductors, and the energy sector. The least likely sectors to benefit are healthcare equipment and services, and telecommunications, which may see a deterioration of profit margins, according to the bank.

Computerworld - Checkr ditches GPT-4 for a smaller genAI model, streamlines background checks

That move did the trick. The accuracy rate for the bulk of the data inched up to 97% — and for the messy data it jumped to 85%. Query response times also dropped to just half a second. Additionally, the cost to fine-tune an SLM based on Llama-3 with about 8 billion parameters was one-fifth of that for a 1.8 billion-parameter GPT-4 model.  

Computerworld - Microsoft 365 Copilot rollouts slowed by data security, ROI concerns

A Gartner survey of 132 IT leaders at companies of a variety sizes in June — around half with 10,000 or more employees — showed that 60% of respondents have started pilot projects to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot. But just 6% had finished their pilots at that point and were actively planning large-scale deployments. And only 1% had completed a Copilot deployment to all eligible office workers in their organization.

Forbes - How Executives Should Think About AI In 23 Questions

For example, in some 2023-2024 data we recently collected at Villanova University, we discovered that despite all of the excitement around AI, only 20% of the companies surveyed defined AI initiatives as high priority, and over 47% defined them as insufficient or unknown. Consistent with this finding, only 25% adequately fund their AI initiatives and 37% believe they do “sometimes.” 37% report that their AI initiatives are not adequately funded or they just don’t know!

Diginomica - AI fast becoming a young male preserve, suggests workplace research

Companies are buying the hammer then looking for a nail, yet in the meantime are throwing that hammer around the workplace – and in some cases using it to help re-erect employment walls that have been slowly dismantled this century.

AiThority - Identifying and Overcoming AI Challenges with Strategic Solutions

Compounding these infrastructure challenges is a widespread shortage of skilled IT professionals, which makes it harder to meet evolving needs. Organizations lacking specialized expertise might struggle to deliver seamless digital experiences, leading to dissatisfied customers and a weakened competitive edge. Additionally, communication gaps between tech teams and the C-suite can exacerbate these issues, as executives may not fully understand the scope of the challenges.

Forbes - AI Agents Will Be The Key To Achieving ROI From AI

For example, an AI agent will have both programmatic or deterministic qualities as well as holistic or unstructured qualities (such as LLM prompts and outputs). It might, for example, initiate a credit check when a user asks questions about a loan; in that case, the LLM would craft a loan proposal based upon the credit score and the natural language inputs of the user, taking into account what terms other banks are offering. By contrast, trying to do the same thing using a chatbot would require multiple requests, and the user might or might not understand how to craft the prompts to get the answer they need.

InfoWorld - How to get LLM-driven applications into production

Many organizations are building generative AI applications driven by large language models (LLMs), but few are transitioning successfully from prototypes to production. According to an October 2023 Gartner survey, 45% of organizations are currently piloting generative AI, while only 10 % have fully deployed it. The lack of AI success is similar for enterprises, product companies, and even some startups focused on LLM-based applications. Some estimates place the failure rate as high as 80 %.

VentureBeat - Generative AI adoption surpasses early PC and internet usage, study finds

“Generative AI has been adopted at a faster pace than PCs or the internet,” the researchers write. “This is driven by faster adoption of generative AI at home compared with the PC, likely because of differences in portability and cost.” The ease of access to tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini has played a crucial role in this faster uptake.

ZDNET - 98% of small firms are using AI tools to 'punch above their weight'

According to the report, "technology use is linked to growth among small businesses." Many small businesses that deployed technology platforms (such as productivity tools, digital payment, and accounting software) are "more likely to have experienced growth in sales and profits over the past year as well as an increase in their workforce."

InfoWorld - Too much assembly required for AI

I could go on. The point is that in these early days of AI, we keep expecting mainstream users to be able to do all the work of understanding and manipulating still-janky LLMs. That’s not their job, just as it wasn’t the “job” of mainstream enterprises to get under the hood and compile Linux for their servers. Red Hat and others came along to package distributions of Linux for mass-market use. We need the same thing for genAI and soon. Once we get that, we’ll see adoption (and the productivity it can generate) soar.

AiThority - An AI Use Case that Every Company Needs – Fixing Revenue and Margin Leakage

Anomaly detection: One of the strengths of AI is its ability to identify outliers and anomalies in data that may be indicative of leakage. For example, AI can analyze sales data to detect unusual discounting patterns, or even changes in revenue or order frequency, that may be correlated with past account churn or defections.

Diginomica - Workday Rising 24 - three CIOs on modernizing tech and improving business processes

Three stories that demonstrate that the role of the CIO, and the platform they chose to implement, are about so much more than technology; these are stories of organizations working in new and more efficient ways.

AiThority - The Promises, Pitfalls & Personalization of AI in Healthcare

Beyond more time with patients, AI can provide real-time insights from patients and clinical teams that traditional surveys or feedback systems simply cannot. New, human-centric AI solutions may be built with a moral framework that ensures the technology closely aligns with societal values to deliver compassionate feedback, relevant coaching and the next best actions to frontline teams, leaders and clinicians.

Forbes - Achieving AI Success In 2024: A Blueprint For IT Leaders

The first step is choosing the right use case for your AI initiative. The most promising use cases are often simply alleviating nagging challenges that have long troubled an organization. These are the problems that have persisted for years despite previous attempts to solve them, and they are typically aligned with overarching company priorities.

Government Technology - Building an Enterprise AI Model

The cloud is an essential part of an enterprise strategy for data access. A flexible and secure cloud computing environment lets organizations easily retrieve data and use it with different AI models. Moreover, this environment provides the compliance guardrails required for sensitive government data, along with a range of AI tools to help organizations take advantage of AI technology in new ways.

Digital Insurance - How insurers use AI to improve their practices

AI can help detect fraud in insurance, but this same technology can be used against insurers to submit fraudulent claims. Rather than using Gen AI to manipulate damage photos for claims, a bigger issue is its use for false identification of policyholders making claims. Synthetic IDs, which are fabricated identities that are not based on real people, are being used to make claims, Karen Jennings, a special investigations unit manager at American Family Insurance, told Digital Insurance's Michael Shashoua.

Data Science Central - How to transform your business digitally with AI

What are the potential downsides of AI in online businesses?

There are multiple drawbacks such as upfront cost, professional staff needed, a small mistake that can lead to the generation of inaccurate results, and many more.

VentureBeat - Grounding LLMs in reality: How one company achieved 70% productivity boost with gen AI

Drip Capital’s approach to AI implementation is notable for its pragmatism. Rather than attempting to build their own LLMs, sophisticated Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), or engage in complex fine-tuning, the company has focused on optimizing their use of existing models through careful prompt engineering.

Forbes - Most Investment Banks Are Applying AI According To This Study

Here’s a number that stood out to me – the assertion that the study found AI can potentially generate up to $1 million annually in value, per employee, in many investment banks.

VentureBeat - DataStax CEO: 2025 will be the year we see true AI transformation

Kapoor strongly advocates for open-source solutions in the GenAI stack, and that companies align themselves around this as they consider ramping up with AI next year. “If the problem is not being solved in open source, it’s probably not worth solving,” he asserts, highlighting the importance of transparency and community-driven innovation for enterprise AI projects.

Forbes - AI’s Role In Saving Teachers Time And Revolutionizing Education

Grading assignments, preparing lesson plans, managing student feedback, emailing parents, and attending professional development meetings all pile up behind the scenes. Teachers often spend more time on these tasks than they do teaching in the classroom. The result? High levels of stress and an increasing number of teachers leaving the profession.

Computerworld - AI to create better products and services, add $19.9T to global economy — IDC

A survey of CFOs in June by Duke University and the Atlanta and Richmond Federal Reserve banks found that 32% of organizations plan to use AI in the next year to complete tasks once done by humans. And in the first six months of 2024, nearly 60% of companies (and 84% of large companies) said they had deployed software, equipment, or technology to automate tasks previously done by employees.

Fast Company - Beyond the hype: The hard truth about AI and data

According to an IBM study, the financial impact of poor data quality on the U.S. economy is estimated to be $3.1 trillion annually, and only 53% of companies surveyed can leverage big data for a competitive advantage. AI will highlight any decencies in the overall data model and schema. AI won’t function as promised if the data isn’t accurate.

Forbes - AI Overlords To AI Overload: Why The AI Hype Needs A Reality Check

AI will undoubtedly remain a major topic of discussion, but there’s an increasing trend of "AI-washing," where marketing hype often eclipses tangible benefits. However, genuine advancements are still happening in fields like medical imaging, surveillance, cybersecurity, industrial production, autonomous driving, amongst others. As AI continues to permeate industries, the real challenge lies in distinguishing meaningful innovation from mere buzzwords.

SmartR AI - Decoding AI Adoption

While embracing AI is crucial for staying competitive to keep up or leapfrog its competitors, overzealous adoption without proper experience can lead to detrimental outcomes. These companies must prioritize gaining experience and proficiency in implementing and managing AI solutions effectively before attempting widespread integration.

AiThority - Nearly 70 Percent of Leaders Prioritize GenAI for Data, with Almost Half Expecting to Double ROI in Three Years, Study Reveals

According to the report, the early adopters find that the technology’s ability to accelerate data-driven decision-making is a key benefit of implementation (44%), alongside its ability to improve products and services (44%), closely followed by how the technology can improve the quality of business insights (42%).

Datanami - Riverbed Global Survey Shows AI Adoption Accelerating, But Gaps Remain

However, the next three years are anticipated to be a period of rapid expansion as enterprises seek practical AI approaches and solutions, and by 2027, 86% of leaders expect their organization to be fully prepared to implement their AI strategy and projects.

Salesforce - New Research Identifies 5 Types of People Defining the AI-Powered Future of Work

Slack’s new Workforce Lab research explores what motivates workers to use AI and how they feel about using it at work. Through in-depth interviews and a survey of 5,000 full-time desk workers, the research uncovered five distinct AI personas that employers need to understand as they implement AI and bring workers onboard “The AI Team” — a workplace where humans and AI agents work successfully side-by-side

Building - Top 150 Consultants 2024: What artificial intelligence and machine learning tools are you using?

“We also have an AI-powered automated tool for checking standard design documents. We have an AI supported knowledge-sharing internal tool. We are in development of a number of other AI applications across the business and we have developed a number of machine learning applications for clients.”

Forbes - Corporate Gen AI Projects Should Plan For Failure - And That’s Okay

As we close in on the two-year anniversary of the launch of ChatGPT-3, it’s become clear that there’s a very high chance your organization will “fail” at building a generative AI assistant. There’s a high likelihood your firm will make the wrong choices, requiring a significant rebuild of the AI assistant sometime within the next three years.

Information Week - Forrester CEO: Lessons for Executives to Implement AI Successfully

“We looked at it and realized, oh, this is only running at 65% accuracy -- not good enough for our clients,” Colony said. “So, the early part is euphoria, but then the hard work sets in. It took us about 12 months to move from 65% accuracy to 85% ... So, when you develop, it’s going to look easy at first, and then it’s going to get really, really, hard.”

AiThority - Kyndryl Survey Reveals 86 Percent of Enterprises Are Moving Fast to Adopt AI to Accelerate Mainframe Modernization

According to the survey respondents, IT modernization projects and patterns are yielding substantial business results, including triple-digit one-year return on investment (ROI) of 114% to 225% and collective savings of $11.9 billion annually. Almost all organizations have opted for a hybrid IT strategy — a combination of modernizing on the mainframe, integrating with public/private cloud, and moving applications and data off the platform. Furthermore, 96% of respondents are migrating some workloads — on average 36% — to the cloud.

ZDNET - Early adopters are deploying AI agents in the enterprise now, with scaled adoption in 2025

What we describe as the six levels of autonomous work refer to the maturity levels of AI assistants versus AI agents. To better understand the adoption forecasts and the impact of AI assistants and agents in the workplace, AI agents are made possible through the emergence of large language models (LLMs) that enable deep language understanding, reasoning, and decision-making.

SiliconANGLE - Salesforce unleashes an army of artificial intelligence bots with Industries AI

“Organizations of every size and every budget can now easily get started with AI capabilities that were purposefully designed to solve their specific challenges, whether it’s helping banks resolve transaction disputes faster, helping retailers better manage their inventories and more,” he said.

Information Week - Designing for the ‘Human in the Loop’

The practical application of AI can often fall short due to a failure to integrate it thoughtfully. Leaders recognize this, but many are still trying to understand what working harmoniously with AI really looks like in their organization. Deloitte research shows that 73% of leaders believe in the importance of ensuring human imagination keeps pace with tech innovation, but a mere 9% are making progress toward achieving that balance.

Forbes - The State Of The AI Super Cycle - NVIDIA, Apple, And The Overall Demand For AI

Then there is a collection of companies just trying to find their place in the AI race. We know the AI device (handsets and PCs) cycle has been a bit slower and that incremental growth of SaaS from AI is showing signs of life from the likes of ServiceNow Inc., Salesforce Inc., and CrowdStrike Inc., who are proving AI can provide stickiness and drive growth on the top and bottom lines. Things have only just begun here.

ZDNET - 1 in 3 workers are using AI multiple times a week - and they're shouting about it

The Observer (16%): Observers have yet to integrate AI into their work. They are watching with interest and caution. This population is mostly indifferent (66%) about AI in the workplace. One-third are interested in learning or further developing AI skills. Companies can work proactively to inspire one out of five workers to be AI advocates. The true enemy of progress is indifference.

TechRepublic - Generative AI Projects Fail Amid High Costs and Risks

The average AI investment of global IT leaders was $879,000 in the last year, according to a report by automation software provider ABBYY. Almost all (96%) of respondents to that survey said they would increase these investments in the next year, despite a third claiming they have concerns about these high costs.

Diginomica - A new enterprise gap to bridge - employers buy into gen AI for productivity gains, their workers aren't so sure

Some of this is because they have to spend time learning how to use the new systems (23%). But two in five also complain of needing to spend more time reviewing or moderating AI content. One in five even say they are finding themselves being asked to do more as a direct result of the technology being introduced.

AiThority - What is Return on AI – and How Do Companies Measure It

This article aims to demystify the concept of RoAI and provide you with a blueprint to measure the true impact of GenAI beyond the hype. We’ll explore why understanding and quantifying RoAI is crucial – not just for tech teams, but for anyone in a leadership role looking to make informed, strategic decisions about AI investments. After all, shouldn’t the adoption of new technology be as smart as the technology itself?

ZDNET - A third of all generative AI projects will be abandoned, says Gartner

For example, at the low end of the scale, using a Gen AI API, which allows a user to consume the publicly-hosted Gen AI model, for things such as coding assistance, means a company might spend around $100,000 to $200,000 upfront, and up to an additional $550 per user per year, Gartner estimates.

Network World - Businesses struggle to balance AI tools and employee skills

The majority of respondents also indicated they would be purchasing business tools with AI features as well as investing in AI tools from vendors. Fewer respondents said they’ll be developing their own tools for internal use. Among IT staff, 71% said they would be buying business tools with AI features, while 67% of business staff said the same. Thirty-five percent of IT staff said they would purchase AI tools from vendors, while 32% of business staff said they would do the same.

VentureBeat - Why we need to check the gen AI hype and get back to reality

We are still in AI’s toddler phase, where popular AI tools like ChatGPT are fun and somewhat useful, but they cannot be relied upon to do whole work. Their answers are inextricable from the inaccuracies and biases of the humans who created them and the sources they trained on, however dubiously obtained. The “hallucinations” look a lot more like projections from our own psyche than legitimate, nascent intelligence.

Forbes - Deja Vu All Over Again? Smoothing The Ups-And-Downs Of AI Hype Cycles

Data quality and availability are also currently the major issues that are slowing down or inhibiting AI from living up to its promise. “AI systems are fundamentally reliant on the quality of the data they are trained on,” said McDonagh-Smith. “I see many organizations struggling with data silos, inconsistent data formats, and complex privacy concerns that span geographies and jurisdictions.”

VentureBeat - Introducing AI’s long-lost twin: Engineered intelligence

When a breakthrough is made in AI, however, there is no distinct discipline for applied artificial intelligence, leading to organizations investing in hiring data scientists who earned their PhD with the aspiration of making scientific breakthroughs in the field of AI to instead try to engineer real-world solutions.

The result? 87% of AI projects fail.

AiThority - Kong’s 2024 Report: 83 Percent of Developers See AI Investments Creating New Product Opportunities

Of course, strengthening security should remain a priority as the report finds an expected 548% growth in the forecasted annual number of API attacks by 2030. Understandably, data privacy and security/governance were a top concern for nearly 60% of developers surveyed when it comes to integrating AI services with existing microservice infrastructure.

Diginomica - Going slow and knowing when not to use generative AI - ServiceNow’s VP of Employee Workflows shares thoughts

Speaking with Alarcon, it’s clear that in her experience buyers are taking a practical and measured approach to how they think about generative AI. Whilst often the impression from vendors can be that generative AI is the key to solving all of an organization’s problems, the reality is that there will be applications where it is useful and situations where it is not. Companies will likely start small, test the appetite amongst employees and consider where they see value. In particular, this in many ways can be seen as an extension of the AI/ML work that enterprises were already implementing.

Blocks & Files - Starburst research highlights key strategies driving AI success

However, in terms of technical obstacles, 52 percent of organizations said they faced “significant hurdles” in organizing structured data for machine learning with AI applications, and 50 percent cited difficulty in preparing unstructured data for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in AI deployments.

Computerworld - BCG execs: AI across the company increased productivity, ‘employee joy’

BCG allows its consultants to build their own GPTs for specific customer interactions, which has fostered an atmosphere of innovation. To date, more than 6,000 GPTs have been created by BCG’s employees to perform tasks such as summarizing documents and video meetings, and automatically generating email responses to clients.

FedScoop - Unlocking the potential of AI with a modern data strategy

Iqbal adds that federal agencies also face similar challenges with data fragmentation and governance. “There needs to be a cloud-based, centralized data lake architecture to store and manage all the structured, semi-structured and unstructured data across the organization,” he says. Iqbal outlines five elements crucial for effective AI applications: a unified data platform, seamless data integration, scalable analytics, secure data governance and access to diverse large language models.

Forbes - When Will AI’s Rewards Surpass Its Risks?

The database of 700-plus AI risks finds more attributed to AI systems (51%) than humans (34%), and were more likely to be seem after AI was deployed (65%) rather than during its development (10%). However, even the most thorough AI frameworks overlook approximately 30% of the risks identified across the factors surfaced in the database.

ZDNET - Six levels of autonomous work: How AI augments, then replaces

New companies very soon will be AI natives, meaning that they simply will not hire humans in the first place except when they have to. These companies will probably show the rest of us where humans are still valuable and where they're not, and we'll follow suit (some faster than others).

Forbes - Why Artificial Intelligence Hype Isn't Living Up To Expectations

You might assume, given the fervor around AI, that industries across the board are rapidly integrating these technologies. Despite the excitement surrounding AI technologies, actual use remains surprisingly low. By February 2024, only 5.4% of firms were utilizing AI. Even with optimistic projections, this number is only expected to reach 6.6% by Fall 2024. This limited adoption suggests that AI’s overall impact is still confined to a narrow slice of the business world.

HRD - Is the hype surrounding generative AI declining?

The survey found that 41% of respondents have struggled to define and measure the impact of their GenAI efforts, with only 16% regularly reporting on the value created by these initiatives.

Rand - The Root Causes of Failure for Artificial Intelligence Projects and How They Can Succeed

Industry leaders should ensure that technical staff understand the project purpose and domain context: Misunderstandings and miscommunications about the intent and purpose of the project are the most common reasons for AI project failure.

PR Week Magazine - AI and communications: Rising above the hype

“It's best for those companies that can adopt it in a way that's natural for their business, brand and culture,” notes HPE’s Paula Berg. “There's a real benefit to companies who allow their employees to use these tools and start to make the cultural changes that will be needed to see the ROI in the coming years.”

Forbes - Hype And Hope Don’t Hide AI’s Hurdles

On one hand, organizational, technical and socio-technical challenges related to the evident need for human oversight, transparency, explainability, technical robustness, security, privacy, data governance, non-discrimination, and fairness are nothing less than business performance requirements for which the hope has not yet fully met its potential.

Computerworld - Generative AI is sliding into the ‘trough of disillusionment’

AI-assisted code generation tools are increasingly prevalent in software engineering, and somewhat unexpectedly have become low-hanging fruit for most organizations experimenting with genAI. Adoption rates are skyrocketing. That’s because even if they only suggest a baseline of code for a new application, automation tools can eliminate hours that otherwise would have been devoted to manual code creation and updating.

Teckedin - AI Adoption and Usage

Every one of us has data in some system, at some company, or in a government agency. I want my data completely purged after it is used for whatever purpose it was collected for. You would think an AI could take care of this. However, our data appears more at risk than it has been with all the scraping of information for AI training purposes.

VentureBeat - Deloitte survey reveals enterprise generative AI production deployment challenges

The new report paints a picture of organizations striving to capitalize on gen AI’s potential while grappling with issues of scalability, data management, risk mitigation and value measurement. It highlights a critical juncture where early successes are driving increased investments, but the path to widespread implementation remains fraught with obstacles.

Information Week - Enterprises Are Racing to Leverage GenAI, But Can They Scale It?

“And, board members often are leading from, how do we know this isn’t going to get us in trouble more than how do we know this is a way to really accelerate the value of the organization? So, I think tech companies are getting pulled in on the trust side, because they’re going to be asked, ‘How do you protect this?’”

SmartR AI - The Reality Check on AI Progress: Challenges and Opportunities

The pace of AI innovation is outstripping the market's ability to adapt and find practical applications; the market is still trying to figure out how and what they should use this new technology for. This has led to overinvestment in promising ideas without sufficient market demand to support them.

Pascal's Substack - GPT-4o: Nearly all companies (98%) indicated they are willing to forgo being the first to use AI in their sector if it means ensuring AI is delivered safely and securely.

Low Adoption Despite Hype: Despite the extensive hype surrounding AI, only 5.4% of U.S. businesses were using AI to produce a product or service in 2024. This is surprisingly low given the massive attention AI has received, indicating that many companies are still in the early stages of AI adoption.

Forbes - Calming Down Nervous Business Leaders As AI Proliferates

More deeply understanding the capabilities of AI, along with its shortcomings, is essential. “Businesses need to put forth the effort to understand AI and identify the appropriate AI models to use before adoption,” said Villanustre. “Like any tool, the adequate use of AI can deliver significant returns on investment, but the incorrect use has the potential of risk and loss.”

VentureBeat - 73% of organizations are embracing gen AI, but far fewer are assessing risks

She said it’s important to ensure accountability and ownership for responsible AI use and deployment be traced to a single executive. This means thinking of AI safety as something beyond technology and having either a chief AI officer or a responsible AI leader who works with different stakeholders within the company to understand business processes.

ZDNET - AI governance and clear roadmap lacking across enterprise adoption

Many also lack a comprehensive AI strategy and are acquiring products primarily for their bells and whistles, according to IBM's AI Readiness Barometer Study released this week. Just 17% of companies assessed in the report have a well-defined AI strategy, with the majority, 38%, still in the midst of developing an AI strategy. Another 30% have an AI strategy that is focused on specific use cases, while 7% admitted to having an AI strategy they eventually discarded or were unable to implement effectively.

CIO - Is the gen AI bubble due to burst? CIOs face rethink ahead

Gen AI projects can cost millions of dollars to implement and incur huge ongoing costs, Gartner notes. For example, a gen AI virtual assistant can cost $5 million to $6.5 million to roll out, with a recurring annual budget hit of $8,000 to $11,000 per user.

Datanami - Is the GenAI Bubble Finally Popping?

The lack of a “killer app” besides coding co-pilots and chatbots is the most pressing concern, critics in a Goldman Sachs Research letter say, while data availability, chip shortages, and power concerns also provide headwinds. However, many remain bullish on the long-term prospects of GenAI for business and society.

Forbes - Go Small To Go Big: Small Wins Prove AI Isn’t A Bubble

Our data is also showing triple-digit percent increases in multimillion-dollar proof of concepts (POCs) in 2024 and mid- to high- double-digit percentage growth of AI use in key industries like financial services, healthcare, and telco growing near 40% CAGR over the next five years. Use cases like object detection and conversational AI are also seeing more than 35% growth (five-year CAGR), which means the silicon investment and infrastructure build out will have to convert to software and industry use cases.

VoxEU - The effect of AI adoption on jobs: Evidence from US commuting zones

Our results also show that the negative effect of AI adoption is not limited to the service sector but also extends to employment in manufacturing, where the use of these technologies is still limited. Specifically, the manufacturing sector accounts for almost 45% of the overall impact of AI adoption on employment, against 60% for the service sector

Diginomica - Getting the business problem horse before the AI cart - MIT finds organizations taking a cautious approach

Shifting through the AI hype and having begun to understand the complexity and cost of implementing LLMs and gen AI from scratch, many companies surveyed have begun to work with partners, rather than adopting a go-it-alone approach, on the basis that if you don't have the necessary expertise and resources to make a significant investment, it’s better to fine-tune and optimize off-the-shelf models.

Forbes - Getting AI Past The Finish Line, Responsibly And Ethically

AI ambitions are substantial, but few have scaled beyond pilots, the survey showed. Fully 95% of companies surveyed are already using AI and 99% expect to in the future. But few organizations have graduated beyond pilot projects, the survey finds. The great majority, 76%, have only deployed AI in one to three use cases.

VentureBeat - LLM progress is slowing — what will it mean for AI?

Over time, we could see some level of commoditization set in, similar to what we’ve seen elsewhere in the technology world. Think of, say, databases and cloud service providers. While there are substantial differences between the various options in the market, and some developers will have clear preferences, most would consider them broadly interchangeable. There is no clear and absolute “winner” in terms of which is the most powerful and capable.

CNBC - The gap between AI expectations and outcomes in the workplace are wide

Meanwhile, companies are also increasing their spending on new AI tools. Forty-four percent of companies said artificial intelligence is the single-largest technology spending budget item for them in the next year and 60% described their new AI investments as “accelerating” in a recent CNBC Technology Executive Council survey.

ZDNET - AI will change all businesses and most leaders are not ready

The report notes that using real-time data and AI in change initiatives can help leaders understand what changes are happening, which areas of the company are most affected, and what actions are best to maximize their investments.

VentureBeat - 86% of enterprises see 6% revenue growth with gen AI use, according to Google Cloud survey

At 63%, more than half credited AI as a business growth driver. The survey noted that, on average, companies saw improved customer leads and acquisitions directly stemming from AI tools. While other verticals like retail and manufacturing also ranked AI-powered lead generation high, 82% of respondents in the financial services said it found the most growth in that area thanks to AI.

Computerworld - How to train an AI-enabled workforce — and why you need to

IT leaders in all regions and sectors are struggling to get skilled people into the right roles and/or upskilling current employees.  IDC research reveals that more than half of organizations worldwide are seeing product delays, quality problems and lost revenues because of the skills crisis, according to reserach firm IDC. IDC predicts that by 2026, more than 90% of organizations will similarly suffer, amounting to more than $5.5T in losses relating to product delays, impaired product quality and missed revenue goals.​

Forbes - Is The AI Bubble About To Burst?

Unlike many dot-com era startups, these AI-centric companies benefit from the support and partnerships of larger tech firms. Moreover, the AI startup landscape is less crowded than the dot-com boom, with fewer companies gaining significant traction. This more concentrated field of serious contenders might lead to a different outcome than we saw in the early 2000s.

Diginomica - Twelve percent of marketers can't live without AI? The State of Marketing AI study holds some surprises

When asked at what stage of AI transformation they are at, nearly half (49%) said they are still understanding (ie learning how AI works and exploring use cases and technologies), 41% are piloting (ie running small pilots with narrow use cases), and 10% are scaling (ie wide-scale adoption that is leading to efficiencies and increased performance). Again, Roetzer said the scaling number is probably lower, depending on how you define scaling.

Forbes - Points Of Adoption On The Gen AI Continuum

But, data work alone is not sufficient; they also needed to integrate the Gen AI technology into their existing technology. In addition, achieving the disruptive impact and improving the business function required a significant investment in operations. The audit firms had to retool the way they conduct audits, restructure the processes, and train the audit teams to use these new processes and new techniques.

Data Science Central - Small Language Models: A Strategic Opportunity for the Masses

While LLMs play a pivotal role in generative analytics, only a few companies have the capabilities and resources to develop and maintain them. Additionally, approaches such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and fine-tuning public LLMs do not fully leverage an organization’s proprietary knowledge while safeguarding sensitive data and intellectual property. Small language models (SLMs) tailored to specific domains provide a more effective solution, offering enhanced precision, relevance, and security.

Information Week - Are Enterprises Investing Too Much or Too Little in AI Now?

New technologies can rise or stumble depending on the monetary investment put into its development. OpenAI introduced an enterprise API to go after more of the business market. Yet, there are reports the company might lose $5 billion this year and potentially run out of money in 12 months.

VentureBeat - In the age of gen AI upskilling, learn and let learn

Generative AI’s rapid introduction across industries has led to a significant skills gap among not only leaders, but employees too, placing heightened pressure on all of us to rapidly uplevel our knowledge base and evolve with the times. However, this evolution isn’t happening organically: 62% of employees report that they lack the skills to effectively and safely use gen AI — and only one in 10 workers globally feel they possess in-demand AI skills.

Digit News - Gartner: 30% of GenAI Projects Will Be Abandoned by 2026

“What you spend, the use cases you invest in and the deployment approaches you take, all determine the costs. Whether you’re a market disruptor and want to infuse AI everywhere, or you have a more conservative focus on productivity gains or extending existing processes, each has different levels of cost, risk, variability and strategic impact.”

ZDNet - Intel sees AI in enterprise on a 'three to five-year path'

The data show "43% of enterprises are exploring proof of concepts on generative AI, but 0% of them had brought generative AI to production in terms of use cases," said Evers, summarizing the findings.  

InfoWorld - The other shoe drops on generative AI

Reality has hit the AI hype machine. On Alphabet’s recent earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai touted widespread adoption of Google Cloud’s generative AI solutions, but with a caveat—and a big one. “We are driving deeper progress on unlocking value, which I’m very bullish will happen. But these things take time.” The TL;DR? There’s a lot of generative AI tire-kicking, and not much adoption for serious applications that generate revenue.

Futurism - Investors Are Suddenly Getting Very Concerned That AI Isn't Making Any Serious Money

"Despite its expensive price tag, the technology is nowhere near where it needs to be in order to be useful," Goldman Sach's most senior stock analyst Jim Covello wrote in a report last month. "Overbuilding things the world doesn’t have use for, or is not ready for, typically ends badly."

Computerworld - Nearly one in three genAI projects will be scrapped

“After last year’s hype, executives are impatient to see returns on genAI investments, yet organizations are struggling to prove and realize value,” said Rita Sallam, a Gartner distinguished vice president analyst. “As the scope of initiatives widen, the financial burden of developing and deploying genAI models is increasingly felt.”

VentureBeat - Unifying gen X, Y, Z and boomers: The overlooked secret to AI success

One critical (yet oftentimes overlooked) facet to gen AI success is the people behind the technology in these projects and the dynamics that exist between them. To derive maximum value from the technology, organizations should form teams that combine the domain-specific knowledge of AI-native talent with the practical, hands-on experience of IT veterans. By nature, these teams often span different generations, disparate skill sets, and varying levels of business understanding.

eWeek - Generative AI for Business: A New Frontier for Efficiency

For instance, if you’re in the financial sector, GenAI can create synthetic transaction data that retains the patterns of real customer behavior, allowing your organization to train AI models for fraud detection without divulging customer information. Synthetic data generation from GenAI solutions is also ideal for the healthcare industry, where data confidentiality is a priority.

The Wall Street Journal - A Clamor for Generative AI (Even If Something Else Works Better)

“The hype is taking all the oxygen out of the conversation and not allowing the appropriate attention on other types of AI models that can really generate value,” said Robert Blumofe, chief technology officer at Akamai Technologies. “The goal is not to solve the business problem. The goal is to adopt AI.”

VentureBeat - How Microsoft is turning AI skeptics into AI power users

“In 2024, we’ve pivoted to that goal, which starts with understanding the business problems that AI is best positioned to solve,” Stallbaumer says. “We are working on it now, across every function — like sales, finance, HR, marketing — looking at all of the processes, hundreds of processes, and then [determining] the KPIs within those processes where AI can actually make a difference. That’s how we’re thinking about measurement now.”

Diginomica - Is generative AI project success in 2024 a realistic goal? A mid-year reassessment

The AI dissonance factor kicks in - we're now running into a troubling issue I call AI dissonance, where research on generative AI adoption boomerangs from optimistic to cautious (the cautions trace back to concerns on security, data privacy, and trust). Therefore, you can cherry pick an AI study to bolster any AI narrative you want, from 'immature technology' to 'enterprise game changer,' so that doesn't help us much.

Forbes - From Pilot To Production in Generative AI: 3 Lessons Learned

In fact, many companies are well down their data platform journey with key decisions behind them on infrastructure and modern data stacks, but data cleansing continues to be “a journey - not a destination”. In reality, this is actually a two-part journey - first cleaning up current data sets, and then designing the new data build – to be first-time right.

Information Week - How to Avoid a GenAI Proof of Concept Graveyard

While the entire GenAI tech stack might seem complex, don’t get stuck over-analyzing the selection of every technology component. Most cloud providers offer similar LLM options, and the technologies are constantly evolving. Pick the most reasonable, popular LLM without too much emphasis on scientific evaluation. Bigger and better models are being released every week. Ensure the architecture is flexible enough for leveraging APIs and swapping out key components with new ones.

Forbes - A New Study Shows That AI Adds To The Workload And Stress Of Employees

“In some cases, AI tools are expected to solve complex problems instantly, leading to unrealistic expectations from management. When AI fails to deliver immediate results, the burden falls back on employees, who must compensate for the gap, increasing their stress levels. While AI has the potential to revolutionize various aspects of our business, it is crucial to recognize and address the challenges it brings,” Alston pointed out.

Forbes - Business Leaders Still Aren’t Prepared For The AI Revolution

Even tech giants like Google or Amazon, I would argue, have found themselves caught off-guard. Sure, both have developed chatbots and integrated them into their services in a number of ways. But have they captured the potential of AI to radically shift the paradigm when it comes to online search or shopping?

VentureBeat - Betting on AI? You must first consider product-market fit

The AI boom isn’t going to plan. Organizations are struggling to turn AI investments into reliable revenue streams. Enterprises are finding generative AI harder to deploy than they’d hoped. AI startups are overvalued, and consumers are losing interest. Even McKinsey, after forecasting $25.6 trillion in economic benefits from AI, now admits that companies need “organizational surgery” to unlock the technology’s full value.

InfoWorld - Messy data is holding enterprises back from AI

AI systems need gigabytes and gigabytes of clear and accurate data to be effective. They find patterns within data and respond to your requests of what those patterns likely mean and how to leverage the insights for strategic business purposes. Suppose the data lacks hygiene or accuracy or is dysfunctional? You’ll get incorrect inferences for your AI system or perhaps answers you won’t know are wrong until it’s too late.

VentureBeat - Moving beyond AI paralysis

AI, of course, relies on data, and given that data volume is expanding at a wild speed, questions around quality, lineage and long-term storage are more critical than ever. Complicating the issue is the number of disparate tools and technologies used to access and manage that data, causing bottlenecks that hamper AI tools.

Android Headlines - Companies are losing faith in AI, and AI is losing money

The fact of the matter is that the companies propping up this technology (the ones injecting billions of dollars into AI companies) are starting to shy away. They’re not as likely to invest so much money in it. Sure, you can’t go online without seeing an ad for some new AI service. You can’t go on social media without seeing some new AI-generated video that makes you fear for the film industry. But, the people making that possible might be stepping back a bit.

Computerworld - Want ROI from genAI? Rethink what both terms mean

That meant that 2024 has become the year of AI postmortems and recriminations about why projects went sour and who was to blame. What can IT leaders do now to make sure that genAI projects launched later this year and throughout 2025 fare better? Experts are suggesting a radical rethinking of how ROI should be measured in genAI deployments, as well as the kinds of projects where generative AI belongs at all.

yahoo!tech - More than 40% of Japanese companies have no plan to make use of AI: Reuters poll

Asked for objectives when adopting AI in a question allowing multiple answers, 60% of respondents said they were trying to cope with a shortage of workers, while 53% aimed to cut labour costs and 36% cited acceleration in research and development.

VentureBeat - Capgemini digs into the real reasons that gen AI proof of concepts rarely take off

He went on to explain that a big chunk of the reason that data is often referred to as the new oil is because oil’s only useful after refinement. In a world where 50% of business decisions will be made by AI by 2030 — that’s to say, primarily in autonomous supply chain applications — that’s unacceptable from a risk perspective. And it poses a profound risk from a data perspective.

AiThority - New HFS Research and Tech Mahindra Report on Generative AI Adoption Finds Most Significant Risk is Doing Nothing

The report emphasizes that adopting a proactive “doer” mindset can propel enterprises beyond proof-of-concept (POC) stages and pilot projects, enabling full operational deployment of GenAI. Compared to those still in planning stages, enterprises embracing this approach are five times more likely to achieve functional GenAI deployment, showcasing tangible benefits of practical strategies.

AiThority - New EY Research Finds AI Investment Is Surging, With Senior Leaders Seeing More Positive ROI as Hype Continues to Become Reality

“Business leaders are beginning to shape their future by raising strategic AI investments,” said Traci Gusher, EY Americas AI, Data and Automation Leader. “But the survey uncovered significant risks on the path to enterprise-wide AI adoption, including data infrastructure, ethical frameworks and talent acquisition. These are key to fully maximizing AI’s abilities and will allow organizations to differentiate themselves in the marketplace.”

VentureBeat - Top ten ways Intuit is revolutionizing personalization with generative AI

The company launched Intuit Assist in September 2023. It is its first gen AI-powered financial assistant for small businesses and consumers. The tool is integrated with and capitalizes on Intuit’s proprietary Generative AI Operating System (GenOS). It’s designed to deliver personalized financial insights and recommendations across products, including TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma and Mailchimp.

Computerworld - Renegade business units trying out genAI will destroy the enterprise before they help

One of the more tired cliches in IT circles refers to “Cowboy IT” or “Wild West IT,” but it’s the most appropriate way to describe enterprise generative AI (genAI) efforts these days. As much as IT is struggling to keep on top of internal genAI efforts, the biggest danger today involves various business units globally creating or purchasing their very own experimental AI efforts.

ZDNet - Time for businesses to move past generative AI hype and find real value

The report found that 27% of organizations run generative AI pilots, with 11% tapping the technology in their software operations. About 75% of large enterprises, with an annual revenue of at least $20 billion, have adopted the technology, compared to 23% of organizations with an annual revenue of between $1 billion and $5 billion.

CIO Dive - CIOs resist vendor-led AI hype, seeking out transparency

While early trends indicate enterprise interest in AI is at an all-time high, CIOs can keep the upper hand in vendor conversations by developing a clear understanding of their organization’s risk appetite, auditing provider claims and leveling unnecessary hype.

VentureBeat - Enterprises embrace generative AI, but challenges remain

It is not clear how pouring money into generative AI is affecting departments that could have otherwise benefitted from the budget, and the return on investment (ROI) for these expenditures remains unclear. But there’s optimism that the added value will eventually justify the costs as there seems to be no slowing in the advances of large language models (LLMs) and other generative models.

AiThority - Survey Reveals Only 20 Percent of Senior IT Leaders Are Using Generative AI in Production

Nearly half of respondents (44%) indicated that their current data tools do not fit their analytics and AI needs, and 43% reported that their current data analytics stack does not meet modern infrastructure standards. Another 88% do not have specific tools or processes for managing LLMs.

Diginomica - AI FOMO - a reality check on AI adoption from Freshworks global study

So here’s a thing - four in ten employees believe they use AI at work, but they aren’t actually sure about that or to what extent! Not that this is preventing a lot of them from claiming to be AI experts. In fact, three quarters of IT people think that, as well as nearly two-thirds (65%) of marketing professionals and just over half (52%) of finance and accounting.

SiliconANGLE - AI’s uncertain path: Companies weigh strategy and implementation in 2024

“Every CIO tells me, their bosses are screaming, ‘We need an AI strategy,’ so they’re investing in the technology,” Kerravala said. “But are we going to wind up in a situation where, without a lack of a roadmap of what to do with AI, you bring the technology, and you spend the money, and then it looks like a bit of a failure, because you didn’t know how to implement it properly?”

Forbes - The Promise And Perils Of Building AI Into Your Business Applications

No matter where you may sit on the AI adoption spectrum, it’s clear that the businesses that are embracing AI are winning a competitive edge. But it’s not as easy as plugging an AI model into your existing infrastructure stack and calling it a win. You’re adding a whole new AI stack, including the model, supply chain, plug-ins and agents—and then giving it access to sensitive internal data for both training and inference. This brings a whole new set of complexities to the security game.

yahoo!finance - Ken Griffin is hitting pause on the AI hype, saying he’s unconvinced the tech will start replacing jobs in the next 3 years

“I’ll ask the question, ‘So tell me how you use AI at your firm today,’ and you get these big smiles, and you get these really enthusiastic answers,” he said, “that have almost nothing to do with AI.”

Network World - AI success: Real or hallucination?

The AI deployments that appeal to enterprise IT teams are those with real, measurable gains – such as AI-driven customer support chatbots, using AI to automate network operations, and self-hosted AI models for business analytics.

Diginomica - While some white collar workers may be worried, logistics and transport sectors are optimistic on AI

And it’s easy to see why. According to the report, every single organization using AI reported benefits in terms of improved safety (45%) and employee productivity (42%). Even at this relatively early stage in the life cycle of AI, it’s a pretty impressive thumbs up for the technology.

Diginomica - Accenture clocks up $2 billion in generative AI sales so far this year - with more to come, according to CEO Julie Sweet

Two important caveats here - that’s impressive growth, but gen AI revenues are still a drop in the ocean when placed against Accenture’s quarterly total of $16.47 billion. The other point to note in terms of shaping future growth expectations is that those numbers are coming from “smaller projects as our clients primarily are in experimentation mode”.

Datanami - CalypsoAI Data Powers Everest Group Report That Reveals Generative AI Adoption Trends

Across business functions, IT (51%) and security (15%) exhibit high GenAI adoption rates, followed by legal (14%) and HR (11%).

The top use cases within IT are automated code generation and debugging (35%), enhanced cybersecurity (30%), virtual assistance and support (20%) and software testing and quality assurance (15%).

ZDNet - Enterprises are preparing to build their own LLMs - why that's a smart move

Constructing these foundational models "is complex and expensive," said Vin, who pointed out that internal enterprise models would build upon the capabilities of these models. "These models will leverage the basic skills of foundational models -- such as language understanding and generation, reasoning, and general knowledge. But they need to extend and specialize them to the industry, enterprise and activity context."

InfoWorld - We need a Red Hat for AI

Everyone is doing AI, but no one knows why. That’s an overstatement, of course, but it feels like the market has hit peak hype without peak productivity. As Monte Carlo CEO Barr Moses highlights from a recent Wakefield survey, 91% of data leaders are building AI applications, but two-thirds of that same group said they don’t trust their data to large language models (LLMs). In other words, they’re building AI on sand.

Forbes - Hype To Harmony: Integrating Generative AI Into Complete AI Approach

Some cracks are certainly starting to show. In the months following ChatGPT’s launch, a slew of new GenAI offerings emerged with many eliciting ante-raising amazement that was certainly earned. But together, they also exposed some technical limitations and adoption challenges, leading more companies to adopt a wait-and-see approach, according to BCG.

AiThority - Taking Generative AI from Proof of Concept to Production

Data readiness and the maturity of the technology used are critical factors in the successful transition from POC to production. POCs are frequently developed using datasets that are not representative of real-world conditions, leading to unrealistic expectations about performance in a production environment. Additionally, the technology used in the POC phase may not be mature enough to support scalable deployment.

eWeek - 10 Most Impactful AI Trends in 2024

As we power through 2024, staying ahead of today’s key AI trends is essential for IT professionals and businesses aiming to leverage cutting-edge technologies to drive growth and innovation. Here’s a quick glance at the top AI trends of the year and their potential impacts:

VentureBeat - McKinsey: Gen AI adoption rockets, generates value for enterprises

The biggest increase in adoption is in professional services, and gen AI is (today at least) most often being used in marketing and sales (for content, personalization and sales leads); product and service development (for design development, scientific literature and research review); and IT (for help desk chatbots, data management, real-time assistance and script suggestions). Also, organizations are seeing the greatest cost reduction in human resources.

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Reuters Institute - What does the public in six countries think of generative AI in news?

ChatGPT is by far the most widely recognised generative AI product – around 50% of the online population in the six countries surveyed have heard of it. It is also by far the most widely used generative AI tool in the six countries surveyed. That being said, frequent use of ChatGPT is rare, with just 1% using it on a daily basis in Japan, rising to 2% in France and the UK, and 7% in the USA. Many of those who say they have used generative AI have used it just once or twice, and it is yet to become part of people’s routine internet use.

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TechBullion - Impact Of AI Chat Technology Across Key Industries

AI chat technology is transforming various industries by enhancing customer service, streamlining operations, and improving overall efficiency. From retail and healthcare to financial services, travel and hospitality, e-commerce, and education, AI chatbots and virtual assistants are driving innovation and delivering significant benefits. As these technologies continue to evolve, their impact will likely grow, further revolutionizing the way businesses operate and interact with customers. By embracing AI chat technology, industries can enhance their service delivery, optimize processes, and stay competitive in an increasingly digital world.

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Fast Company – Instagram is training AI on your data. It’s nearly impossible to opt out 

“To help bring these experiences to you, we’ll now rely on the legal basis called legitimate interests for using your information to develop and improve Al at Meta. This means you have the right to object to how your information is used for these purposes. If your objection is honored, it will be applied going forward.”

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Computerworld - Public opinion on AI divided

Age and gender made a big difference: Males aged 18-34 were by far the biggest users at 33%, while only 16% of females in that age group regularly use LLM chatbots at work. Almost half (48%) of workers using LLMs said they had figured out how to use the tools on their own, although this, too, varied by age. Workers under 55 preferred to explore the technology on their own, while those aged 55 or over expressed a desire for formal AI training.

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Diginomica - Clarity may be emerging in AI capabilities pricing. Here's how

Software vendors have poured on the communications blitz to inform customers and buyers that they have started incorporating artificial intelligence into their products. But, they have simultaneously, conspicuously and quietly avoided discussions about what these new capabilities will cost. Hang onto your checkbooks folks as software vendors might be gearing up to wallet-frack your company’s bank account again.

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Information Week - Addressing Trending Questions About Generative AI

The most forward-thinking organizations are creating an ongoing GenAI educational curriculum to build awareness, increase knowledge and foster creation among their staff. This approach feeds a dynamic, iterative process of collecting ideas and use cases in a methodical manner.  

Techradar - Hardly any of us are using AI tools like ChatGPT, study says – here’s why

Even among the people who have used generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini or Microsoft Copilot, a large proportion said they'd only used them "once or twice". Only a tiny minority (7% in the US, 2% in the UK) said they use the most well-known AI tool, ChatGPT, on a daily basis.

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Computerworld - Job seekers and hiring managers depend on AI — at what cost to truth and fairness?

The darker side to using AI in hiring is that it can bypass potential candidates based on predetermined criteria that don’t necessarily take all of a candidate’s skills into account or they can contain hidden biases based on how they were trained by their creators. And for job seekers, the technology can generate great-looking resumes, but often they’re not completely truthful when it comes to skill sets.

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VentureBeat - OpenAI is devouring the media industry

The most obvious answer is that in so doing, it gains access to licensed training data that it can use to build powerful new AI models that can write as well as your average Wall Street Journal reporter.

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 ZDNet - I tested Opera's new Gemini-powered AI capabilities and came away impressed

This new integration isn't just about being able to respond more quickly and accurately to queries. Users will also find Opera's Aria AI now includes new features, such as the ability to read responses out loud. It's also capable of rendering images based on queries, thanks to the Imagen 2 model on Vertex AI.

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ComputerWeekly - Why reliable data is essential for trustworthy AI

“Governance is even more critical when delivering AI-infused data products,” Gartner’s Alys Woodward told the firm’s Data and Analytics Summit. “With AI, unintended consequences can emerge rapidly. We’ve already seen some examples of successful implementations of GenAI. These organisations deploy the technology with appropriate guardrails and targeted use cases, but we never know when our AI-infused data products will lead us into trouble.”

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Forbes - Three Change Management Priorities For Seamless GenAI Deployment

It’s also important for employees and customers to be assured that their data privacy will continue to be top of mind as the technology becomes further scaled to be used within day-to-day workstreams. Be sure to communicate that protocols and guidelines will evolve in the spirit of fostering an ethical and socially responsible AI culture. All of this translates to more support and buy-in across the enterprise.

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