AI spending and adoption on the rise, says IDC survey

Artificial intelligence (AI) spending and adoption within business is on the rise, according to an IDC survey of more than 2000 IT and line-of-business (LoB) decision-makers.

Delivering a better customer experience was the leading driver of AI implementation — with threat analysis, process automation, supply and logistics, and human resources among the most popular use-case categories.

Ritu Jyoti, IDC Program Vice President, Artificial Intelligence Strategies, said the technology was supporting executives in their quest to achieve a host of business objectives.

“Organisations worldwide are adopting AI in their business transformation journey, not just because they can but because they must to be agile, resilient, innovative and able to scale,” she said.

“Early adopters report an improvement of almost 25% in customer experience, accelerated rates of innovation, higher competitiveness, higher margins and better employee experience with the rollout of AI solutions.”

Despite the overall optimism, a lack of quality training data and high costs when procuring from certain vendors remained a challenge in terms of further scaling the technology.

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