80% of global enterprises are investing in AI

80 per cent of global enterprises are investing today in Artificial Intelligence (AI) but enterprises need to invest more over the next 36 months to keep pace with competitors.

“There is an important trend emerging evident in this report — enterprises today see AI as a strategic priority that will help them outpace the competition in their respective industries,” says Atif Kureishy, Vice President, Emerging Practices at ThinkBig, a Teradata company.

Commenting on the results of the survey, Rajesh Shewani, Head – Technology and Solution Architecture, Teradata India said, “AI is going to be the next big differentiator for both society and enterprises. In the Indian context I believe AI can be a huge disruptor as our social and economic problems are bigger and in many ways more complex and challenging. It is heartening to see Indian enterprises echoing the same sentiments as their APAC peers.”

AI will have a lot of impact on IT, technology and telecoms (59 per cent), business and professional services (43 per cent), and customer services and financial services (32 per cent). However it changes at APAC level,  IT, technology and telecoms (63 per cent) contributes the highest, the second highest contributors are financial services (38 per cent) and manufacturing and production (38 per cent)  that are tied at second followed by business & professional services (35 per cent).

The top three challenges where businesses expect AI to drive revenue are product innovation/research and development (50 per cent), customer service (46 per cent), and supply chain and operations (42 per cent). For APAC, the respondents report much higher for product innovation/research and development (65 per cent), followed by customer service (54 per cent), and supply chain and operations (40 per cent).

This was reflected by some of the top areas of AI investment, which include customer experience (62 per cent), product innovation (59 per cent) and operational excellence (55 per cent).

On an average, the companies surveyed are currently investing $6.47 million in AI technology — that number rises to $8.25 million average spend for companies in APAC.

91 per cent expect to see barriers to AI realization, with lack of IT infrastructure (40 per cent) and lack of access to talent (34 per cent) leading the challenges, followed by lack of budget for implementation (30 per cent), complications around policies, regulations and rights (28 per cent) and impact on customer expectations (23 per cent).

The survey was conducted among 260 large organizations that operate globally including 60 from APAC region, conducted by leading technology industry market research firm Vanson Bourne on behalf of Teradata, the leading data and analytics company.