As AI continues to take center stage, organizations worldwide are grappling with how to leverage its potential. Not wanting to get lost in chatter and speculation, HPE took a deep dive into what’s happening in AI by bubbling up research insights from AI strategists, implementers, and influencers. Follow along as I look closer at the feedback to discover where enterprises are mixing the right ingredients for success and where they are underprepared in their AI development journey.
After a year where AI simmered to the top of the global agenda, it’s now sizzling hot at organizations everywhere. But amid the bright promises of AI’s many benefits and dizzying speculation about its future uses, we still don’t really know what’s below the surface. How can you best use AI to your advantage? Where are enterprises mastering the recipe, and where are they already feeling the burn?
Listening to different perspectives on AI
To help provide you with actionable insights and valuable perspectives to inform your own AI strategies, we conducted a series of AI market research studies. Beyond the hundreds of daily conversations we have with our customers, market research can add the next layer of value—giving us the ability to gain comparative insights from a huge cross-section of industries, regions, and countries.
Research provides a reality check against which we can test our thinking and gauge sentiment. Ultimately, listening to the priorities and concerns of AI stakeholders can help all of us tease out common threads—or identify compelling differences—that in the long game will allow us to meet our customers’ needs with greater clarity.
Over the last few months, we’ve undertaken a number of research projects to understand where organizations are in their AI journeys. The results have been eye-opening and give us cause to reflect on the complexities of the AI journey that all of us face.
Targeted insights
The very first question we had to ask ourselves was: who should we survey? That’s not as straightforward an answer as it seems. The allure of AI reaches across the enterprise, but therein lies the rub. When everyone has skin in the game, everyone also wants a say. So, our initial decision was, do we talk to the teams implementing AI? To those developing and building AI models and applications? Those using it? Paying for it? And how about those regulating it?
I am a staunch believer that all voices are heard and those who want it should get a seat at the table. For us, the answer to “whose voices should we hear” meant running two concurrent research streams to get at the heart of AI-deployment issues—the first speaking directly with IT leaders and the second with a broader audience of AI influencers, incorporating line of business execs, data scientists, developers and more. Many of the businesses surveyed have a complex blend of internal AI stakeholders, who often hold different priorities. It is a mix that businesses absolutely must get right. The exact recipe they land on is a good indication of how strategically they are using AI and what AI’s likely impact on business outcomes will be as a result. Too few ingredients and the scope of an organization’s AI initiatives will be limited. Too many chefs in the kitchen, and their AI approach is at risk of becoming too muddled to be effective.
The decision makers, redefined
So let’s look at what we discovered. Across both research streams—AI leaders and AI influencers—the audiences we surveyed generally agreed that the right people are involved in defining their organization’s AI strategy. That said, organizations still need to better define the role each stakeholder should play. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, there are telling disagreements in both groups about who should be a decision maker versus an influencer.
While most of the decision-making currently sits squarely with the CEO and IT leadership, almost three quarters (71%) of the influencer group believed they should have greater involvement in their organization’s AI strategy. The influencer group felt the same about involving other C-level stakeholders like the COO and CISO. Meanwhile, the CIO was curiously selected as someone who should have slightly less of a say.
Wanted: cross-business collaborators
Another focus of the research was: are we ready for it? The answers from both AI leaders and AI influencers show that we are in the early days of AI adoption. Only 11% of our influencer audience think their organizations are currently set up to truly realize the benefits of AI.
To accelerate their levels of preparedness and realize the promised business value, businesses must develop an approach that considers the impact of AI across the full scope of their operations from end to end. They need to find a way to do this holistically, creating and then executing a single strategy that incorporates everything from goals to provisioning, ethics to hosting.
This level of cross-business collaboration necessitates defined roles and responsibilities for everyone in the larger stakeholder group. But we didn’t see evidence of this collaborative approach in the data in either audience. In fact, the fragmentation is more pronounced among our IT leader audience, where we also uncovered additional gaps and total blind spots in the pursuit of AI success.
We will share more data and insights from our research among IT leaders in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for more insights as you prep for your AI journey. By making a few adjustments to the mix, we can hopefully all discover the ultimate recipe for AI success.
