Are Businesses Ready For AI? This Is What More Than 3,000 Executives Think

Artificial intelligence has become one of the biggest technological developments in business in recent years, but the field is still largely shrouded in uncertainty. Business-process-outsourcing companies, for example, expect many of the jobs that moved to low-labor-cost countries in recent years to be automated. However, they also expect AI to lead to new activities and sources of employment. Three-quarters of executives believe that AI will enable their companies to move into new businesses and almost 85% believe AI will allow their companies to obtain or sustain a competitive advantage. But while more than 60% of respondents said that a strategy for AI is urgent for their organizations, only half of those said that their organizations have a strategy in place. The largest companies (those with more than 100,000 employees) are the most likely to have an AI strategy, but only half have one. The biggest hurdles at these companies are hiring and developing talent and establishing priorities for AI investments; they are also starting to worry about security issues related to AI. One of the most telling differences between leaders and laggards is their understanding of the importance of data, training, and algorithms. AI algorithms are not natively “intelligent.” AI starts with “naked” algorithms that become intelligent only upon being trained on large amounts of data and, for most business applications, large amounts of company-specific data. The need to train AI algorithms with appropriate data has wide-ranging implications for the traditional make-versus-buy decision that companies face with new-technology investments. Generating value from AI is more complex than simply making or buying AI for a business process.

Reference: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/09/how-to-know-if-your-business-is-ready-for-ai