Understanding the data your business your collects is crucial to its success. Acting on insights and transforming historical interactions into predictive analysis are key to successful business models. AI – a popular buzzword among industry professionals and employees, still has a long way to go before it is in widespread use and organisations are maximising the value of their data.
The state of play
Computing's latest research into this space, conducted in collaboration with Intel®, finds AI technology is extremely attractive, with 98 per cent of organisations surveyed saying they are at least interested in employing AI or machine learning. However, just 7 per cent could say they had fully implemented the technology. A slim majority, around a third of respondents, are still in the trialling/incubating stage of adoption, establishing AI frameworks mainly for data analytics and natural language processing.
Many factors contribute to relatively slow adoption. Talent shortages, economic uncertainty, and favouring other digital programmes due to time-consuming day-to-day IT management are all pervasive problems.
However, while organisations evidently have a long way to go before they reach AI maturity, it does not mean they cannot experience the gains from lower hanging fruit.
For those at the beginning of their AI journey, data analytics is a natural home for leveraging AI's potential to spot patterns and learn over time.
The savings on cost, time, and oversight are huge gains reported by organisations utilising AI. It allows organisations to make decisions confidently, backed by intelligent digestible information.
Taking the next step
Ultimately, maturity denotes an organisation's ability to fully achieve and scale impact from their AI systems. Developing the appropriate data and technology infrastructure, while educating teams and fostering an innovative environment, ensures benefits are fully realised.
Organisations that are reluctant or have stalled in their AI journey should focus on the business outcomes and the most cost-effective and easy wins - drawing on partner support where needed.
Around a third of respondents in the AI trialling stage report the technology is already having a significant positive impact on their organisation, with 63 per cent of those in the midst of implementation similarly recognising substantial improvements. Strikingly, roughly 90 per cent of organisations fully utilising AI state it is having a considerable positive influence.
Demonstrably, AI transformation affords early successes and with that comes increased faith in its value. While maturity is not widespread, interest is huge, benefits are being seen, and most organisations have at least begun to embark on their AI journey.
To learn more about Computing's research into real world AI use cases with real results, read the full report.
Sponsor insight - Intel
Organisations must harness AI to extract value from data, but challenges abound. Data pre-processing, from discovery to breaking down silos, to quality control, and managing it from edge to cloud, come first. Taking the right approach to modelling, from analytics to machine or deep learning, with the right technology and expertise comes next.
Intel provides a holistic and open path forward, addressing the full data, modelling and deployment pipeline, with the freedom to compute on whichever architecture is best, including the only x86 CPU with built-in AI acceleration.
This article is sponsored.
