Artificial Intelligence Loses Some Of Its Edginess, But Is Poised To Take Off
More than a decade ago, Nicholas Carr, in his work Does IT Matter, suggested that the widespread availability and low prices of technology made it more of a utility like electricity or water, versus a competitive differentiator. This may be happening with artificial intelligence to some degree.
“It appears that AI’s early adopter phase is ending; the market is now moving into the ‘early majority’ chapter of this maturing set of technologies,” write Beena Ammanath, David Jarvis and Susanne Hupfer, all with Deloitte, in their most recent analysis of the enterprise AI space. “Early-mover advantage may fade soon. As adoption becomes ubiquitous, AI-powered organizations may have to work harder to maintain an edge over their industry peers.”
Seventy-four prevent of 2,727 executives responding to a Deloitte survey agree that AI will be integrated into all of their enterprise applications within three years. “Although adopters are still bullish on AI, their advantage may wane as barriers to adoption fall and usage grows, Ammanath and her co-authors state. “Organizations are finding it easier and easier to employ AI technologies. Data science and machine learning platforms have proliferated; AI-optimized hardware is providing greater compute power. It is now easier to train algorithms through self-service data preparation tools, synthetic data, small data, and pretrained models.”
It is increasingly clear that “we are on the path toward an era of pervasive AI,” they add. The challenge now is leveraging AI in innovative ways to maintain its advantages, the study finds. For example, much of the work with AI is still confined to managing IT systems. In addition, there still isn’t enough AI talent to go around.
At least 26% of the companies surveyed can be considered “seasoned” AI adopters, meaning they “have undertaken a large number of AI production deployments and have developed a high level of AI expertise across the board. These AI leaders are still seeing competitive advantage — 45% of this group said that AI technologies have enabled them to establish a significant lead over their competitors, versus 26% of the entire sample.
Still, this means a majority of even the most advanced AI companies, 55%, still aren’t seeing competitive advantage. Part of this may be due to the fact that AI is still confined to IT departments and functions, including cybersecurity Forty-seven percent of respondents indicated that IT was one of the top two functions for which AI was primarily used, the survey shows.
