44% IT leaders believe organisations set to realise AI benefits: Report

Nearly half (44 per cent) of IT leaders surveyed believe their organisations are fully set up to realise the benefits of AI, according to the research report by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

The report highlighted critical gaps in their strategies, for example lack of alignment between processes and metrics, resulting in consequential fragmentation in approach, which will further exacerbate delivery issues.

The report found that while global commitment to AI shows growing investments, businesses are overlooking key areas that will have a bearing on their ability to deliver successful AI outcomes – including low data maturity levels, possible deficiencies in their networking and compute provisioning, and vital ethics and compliance considerations.

“These findings clearly demonstrate the appetite for AI, but they also highlight real blind spots that could see progress stagnate if a more holistic approach is not followed. Misalignment on strategy and department involvement – for example – can impede organisations from leveraging critical areas of expertise, making effective and efficient decisions, and ensuring a holistic AI roadmap benefits all areas of the business congruently,” said Sylvia Hooks, VP, HPE Aruba Networking.

Strong AI performance that impacts business outcomes depends on quality data input, but the research shows that while organisations clearly understand this – labeling data management as one of the most critical elements for AI success – their data maturity levels remain low. Only 7 per cent of organisations can run real-time data pushes/pulls to enable innovation and external data monetization, while just 26 per cent have set up data governance models and can run advanced analytics.

Fewer than 6 in 10 respondents said their organisation is completely capable of handling any of the key stages of data preparation for use in AI models – from accessing 59 per cent and storing 57 per cent, to processing 55 per cent and recovering 51 per cent. This discrepancy risks slowing down the AI model creation process and also increases the probability the model will deliver inaccurate insights and a negative ROI.

A similar gap appeared when respondents were asked about the compute and networking requirements across the end-to-end AI lifecycle. About 93 per cent of IT leaders believe their network infrastructure is set up to support AI traffic, while 84 per cent agree their systems have enough flexibility in compute capacity to support the unique demands across different stages of the AI lifecycle.

Key areas of business

Organisations are failing to connect the dots between key areas of business, with over a quarter 28 per cent of IT leaders describing their organisation’s overall AI approach as “fragmented.” About 35 per cent of organisations have chosen to create separate AI strategies for individual functions, while 32 per cent are creating different sets of goals altogether.

The research shows that legal/compliance 13 per cent and ethics 11 per cent were deemed by IT leaders to be the least critical for AI success. In addition, the results showed that almost 1 in 4 organisations 22 per cent aren’t involving legal teams in their business’s AI strategy conversations at all.

(Inputs from BL intern Meghna Barik)