ZDNET’s key takeaways
- 54% of I&O leaders are using AI to cut spending, Gartner says.
- 50% also cited budget constraints as their biggest AI bottleneck.
- Industries are focusing less on AI hype, more on practical use.
The great AI sobering-up is upon us.
After years of feverishly racing to adopt AI — for uses that weren’t always entirely clear — some businesses and industry analysts have been slowing down, taking a deep breath, and trying to be more methodical in how they use the technology. Part of that has meant assessing what’s working and what’s been regularly challenging across industries.
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A new report from Gartner is a perfect example. On Wednesday, the market research firm published the results of a survey that found that more than half (54%) of infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders have been using AI to reduce spending.
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‘Frumpy but functional’ is back
Conducted across the US, UK, India, and Germany, the survey polled 253 I&O employees responsible for overseeing their respective employers’ IT ecosystems to understand how their organizations were using AI and the biggest challenges they faced in adopting the technology.
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Half of all respondents cited budget constraints as the biggest factor preventing their companies from incorporating AI, while slightly less (48%) said “integration difficulties” were their biggest bottleneck. The findings add to a steadily growing body of evidence indicating that most businesses using AI (as much as 95%, according to a recent study from MIT) are not seeing significant returns on their investments in the technology.
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However, one of the big takeaways from the MIT study was that the 5% or so of businesses that have been profiting from their use of AI have been using it to automate “back-office” – think: monotonous and inconspicuous – tasks, as opposed to the super-visible use-cases that business leaders might be tempted to adopt in order to make it abundantly clear to customers and competitors that they’re keeping ahead of the technological curve.
That analysis also aligns with a report published by Forrester, another market research firm, earlier this month, which argued that exuberant AI hype was yielding to a new era in which the technology would be used for more “frumpy but functional” purposes.
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In its new report, Gartner urges I&O leaders to take a similar approach: focus less on trying to sensationalize your use of AI, and start small, even if that feels boring.
“Rather than chasing big AI projects, they should start with high-value, feasible pilots and flexible upgrades,” Gartner Research Director Melanie Freeze said in a statement accompanying the results. “For example, organizations could use GenAI for cloud cost management to automatically analyze cloud billing, resource usage and infrastructure efficiency.”
Barriers to AI adoption
Adoption difficulties could be due in part to a lack of AI safety guardrails and the insecurity that engenders. A recent survey conducted by data analytics company SAS and the International Data Corporation (IDC) found that while the majority of respondents (65%) said their organizations are currently using AI, only 40% had actually taken concrete steps to implement safety policies and guardrails ensuring that their internal AI systems were trustworthy.
The rest, according to the SAS and IDC, were working somewhere between uncertainty and unreliability, which was sapping their ability to get the most out of their AI efforts.
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Yet another study from the National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCA) published last month found that 43% of workers have shared sensitive information with AI, including financial and client data.
