Based on a recent poll, businesses’ adoption rate of generative AI has yet to keep up with the buzz around the technology. Data protection, regulations, and IT infrastructure are the main obstacles preventing the technology from being widely used.
According to a poll conducted by Australia-based Telstra and the MIT Technology Review Insights, only 9% of more than 300 corporate leaders worldwide were found to be heavily utilizing AI.
Although the initial adopters of AI have only used it in a few business areas, most executives supported the technology’s potential and anticipated seeing it used more widely.
The inaugural chief of Australia’s National Artificial Intelligence Centre, Stela Solar, stated in the survey report that there is a misperception regarding the ease of use of mature, enterprise-ready, generative AI.
According to her, organizations may be required to enhance data quality and capabilities, privacy protections, and intelligence skills and establish secure and accountable AI governance throughout the entire organization to use it.
The app design, integration with information and company procedures, corporate policies, and other related elements are still required.
Aspirations and obstacles
Most company executives stated that they anticipate generative AI becoming utilized for more than twice as many commercial activities or general purposes by 2024.
According to Chris Levanes, the director of Telstra’s South Asia marketing, the initial adopters in 2023 primarily used the software to automate low-value, repetitive operations because they required less human supervision.
By 2024, 85% of the participants anticipate using generative artificial intelligence for these low-value employment opportunities. 77% want to use it for customer support, and 74% want it for strategy analysis.
Sales, supply chain management, and product innovation were other domains for possible implementation.
The paper noted several obstacles to the widespread adoption of generative artificial intelligence within the coming year, namely IT resources and skills, characterizing these ambitions as high on “ambition and hubris.”
Less than 30% of respondents said that their company’s IT characteristics would allow generative AI to be adopted quickly, and those implementing generative AI have even less faith in their IT infrastructure’s ability to handle the new technology.
On the other hand, a majority of 56% of the participants stated that their overall IT expenditure budgets restricted the implementation of generative AI.
Up to 77% of respondents identified governance, compliance, and data protection as the main obstacles to the quick adoption of the generative AI ecosystem. These issues have been a significant concern since the technology gained notoriety at the end of 2022 by introducing Open AI’s well-liked ChatGPT.
Since then, the technology has given rise to other legal disputes about the copyrights of content produced by AI. Because of its use, major corporations have also encountered security problems and the leakage of confidential information.
Laurence Liew, president of artificial intelligence creativity at AI Singapore, highlighted to the media during Monday’s launch of the newly published MIT paper that establishing clear governance frameworks and security procedures for AI models is necessary to mitigate these risks.
Businesses must consider whether they have the proper governance and whether their internal papers are securely segregated. Liew stated that companies should avoid using artificial intelligence (AI) models that are vulnerable to being misled into revealing sensitive data, like employee pay.
According to the survey, only a small proportion of respondents stated that their cybersecurity procedures are at maximum moderately capable of enabling a generative AI rollout, indicating that the capacity to deal with these risks partly depends on organizations putting strong internal cybersecurity measures in place.
Survey respondents highlighted the lack of appropriate generative AI abilities as one of the other challenges to implementing generative AI. Businesses are concerned that they lack the necessary skills internally and that it is not readily available externally.
The disrupted and the disruptors
However, most respondents to the study expressed optimism over the application of generative artificial intelligence in industry. Although generative AI is predicted by six out of ten respondents to disrupt their sector significantly for the coming five years, seventy-eight percent perceive it as an advantage over their competitors. About 8% perceive it as a danger.
Geraldine Kor, the president in South Asia and head of the international enterprise at Telstra International, believes that soon it will be well worth the investment to build generative artificial intelligence solutions that can wisely manage large datasets and understand them for companies.
According to a statement she released on Monday regarding the study, Generative AI competence, when implemented successfully, will be an essential development for most businesses and will differentiate experts from followers.
In a McKinsey research from last year, it was stated that the world economy may grow by approximately $4.4 trillion each year due to generative AI, with the areas most affected being marketing, sales, customer activities, development of software, and scientific research and development sectors.
