Massive adoption of AI projects in companies, the Axians France and HPE survey

15 janvier 2021

Axians France (VINCI Energies) and HPE conducted a survey between June and July 2020 on the development of AI projects in French companies. While artificial intelligence has become a major concern for companies and many are convinced of the advantages of this technology in terms of decision-making capacity, innovation and responsiveness, certain obstacles remain.

Computer graphics at the end of the article.

Conducted between June and July 2020, this study was carried out among 144 CIOs, IT managers, project managers and consultants. All business sectors and all sizes of companies were represented.

“AI has become a major concern for companies. Indeed, 62% of respondents to this survey indicated that they have a project in the process of deployment or under consideration,” comments Yves Pellemans, CTO Axians France (VINCI Energies). “But if only 24% of the respondents have implemented a hardware solution for AI, almost half of them use configurations of more than 500 CPUs, i.e. significant computing power for AI,” he adds.

Predictive and automation: the dominant AI projects

For the CIOs, IT managers, project managers and consultants surveyed, the main principles covered by AI develop around predictive (72.4%) and automation (61.2%). The processing of data from objects connected to or dumped into the datalake is also a major concern for companies.

As for the main application areas of AI, 62.2% of respondents use it for automated learning, 53.1% for anomaly and fraud detection, 52% for predictive maintenance, 48% for image and video recognition and 45% for calculation and forecasting.

Advantages and brakes of AI

For more than 60% of respondents, AI improves their decision-making and innovation capacity. And for more than 40%, it increases their speed and reaction in real time.

As for the disadvantages, the first obstacle is the lack of skills of the internal teams, the second is insufficient IT resources and the third is the budget. The impact of AI on employment and the loss of process control are also mentioned.

A major need for support

As for the partners, companies expect them to provide support and advice on technical optimisation, support in the choice of hardware and software. They also expect the definition of use cases and the delegation of specialized personnel.

“From this survey, we can deduce that companies have clearly identified the use cases of AI: predictive model, automation, data processing. We have now entered a phase of industrialization of the offers for which we still need to find the necessary skills and support to go to scale”, concludes Yves Pellemans.