Execs Bullish on AI but Wary of Data Leadership
Every year in December and January, NewVantage Partners (NVP) conducts a survey of data and technology executives in large companies primarily located in the U.S. Every year, we (the authors) collaborate in analyzing and interpreting the results. And every year, we wonder why the survey results suggest that certain aspects of the data environment aren’t getting better faster, or why they sometimes even become worse.
The executives are usually pretty bullish about technology but quite bearish regarding whether their organizations are becoming more data-driven. They also express concerns about the executive roles — most frequently, the role of chief data officer (CDO) — that are charged with making their company’s data environment better.
The exercise of us writing — and you reading — about these results could become a little depressing. But we are somewhat heartened by the 2021 survey for several reasons: a higher-than-ever participation rate (85 large companies), the absence of major COVID-19-related problems for the surveyed companies, the more-than-typical positivity of respondents regarding technology, and some slight improvements in perspectives on the data executive role. Of course, the challenges of changing human behavior and organizational culture remain substantial. To cite only one survey result that illustrates the issue, 92% of respondents attributed the “principal challenge to becoming data-driven” to “people, business processes, and culture,” with only 8% identifying technology as the culprit. This response has remained constant over several years of surveys.
For the past several years, the survey has assessed companies’ success with the combined category of big data and AI. This year, an impressively high percentage — 96%, up more than 25% from the previous year — said their organizations had achieved successful outcomes. Almost as many, 92%, reported that the pace of big data/AI investment was accelerating — up 40% from 2020. Overall, 81% are optimistic about the future of these resources in their organizations.
We were pleasantly surprised by these findings, since other surveys and market research organizations had suggested that the production deployment of AI systems was a significant problem. In the NVP survey, the percentage reporting that AI applications are in either widespread or limited production reached 77% — although, admittedly, most report only limited production. This seems to be evidence that the experimental period for AI is coming to a close and that more companies are putting AI to work in their businesses.
The optimistic findings in the NVP survey are consistent with those in the 2020 global Deloitte State of AI in the Enterprise survey, which found that 75% of surveyed IT executives expect organizational transformation to result from AI within three years — up 18 percentage points from the 2018 survey. The limits to production deployment are also seen in a McKinsey global AI survey of companies from 2019; 58% of surveyed executives reported at least one successful deployment in products or processes, but only 30% of those companies used AI across multiple business units and functions.
