In a study conducted by Morning Consult for IBM, different countries around the world were scrutinized to better understand their uses of artificial intelligence, especially within groups and institutions. The results indicate that AI is increasingly being considered and explored by businesses. The issue of trust was also discussed, as well as the potential barriers to the use of AI within a brand.

A progressive adoption of artificial intelligence by companies

According to the “Global AI Adoption Index 2021” study, worldwide, 31% of the companies surveyed have accelerated the deployment of AI in their structure, while 43% of them are looking to exploit it and are exploring all the possibilities before jumping in. As for France, just over 20% of respondents are looking to develop AI in their company at the moment, while over 35% say they are interested in exploiting it in the future.

The main drivers of AI adoption in organizations are:

• Advances in AI that make it more accessible to businesses (46%)
• Traditional business needs (46%)
• Changing business needs due to COVID-19 (44%)

The top three factors companies consider when evaluating the potential AI vendor they want to choose are:

• Ability to automate processes to enable higher value-added work (47%)
• Brings confidence in improving business results for the brand (40%)
• Ability to be deployed at multiple points (private and public cloud, on-premise, etc.) (40%)

Of the companies surveyed, 31% of them want to leverage AI in data protection, 25% of them in process automation or customer service, and 20% would like to develop virtual assistants for intelligent chatbots. But one of the strongest uses of AI is in natural language processing (NLP): 42% of organisations are currently using NLP, and 26% want to exploit it in the next 12 months.

Artificial intelligence: trust and barriers

More than 90% of companies that use AI in their organization have confidence in AI, especially in critical situations. Among the most important aspects for organizations are: maintaining brand integrity and customer trust, the ability to monitor and manage data throughout the AI lifecycle, or compliance with regulatory obligations.

At the same time, more than half of the companies surveyed cited several barriers to developing trustworthy AI, including a lack of skills or training to develop and manage trustworthy AI, AI governance tools that don’t work in all data environments, AI results that are sometimes not explainable, and a lack of regulatory guidance from governments or the industry at large.

Translated from IBM dévoile une étude sur l’adoption de l’intelligence artificielle par les entreprises