Dive brief:
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According to a recent study conducted by research firm IDC and sponsored by Microsoft, organizations are realizing a return on their AI investments within 14 months of deployment.
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For every $1 companies invest in AI, they get an average of $3.50 in return, according to a report on the findings. The research is based on a survey of 2,109 business organizations worldwide.
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“The study illustrates that AI has demonstrable business value, and we are seeing this surface in core use cases in areas such as employee experience, customer engagement and internal business processes, and how AI can help bend the innovation curve,” Alysa Taylor, corporate. vice president of Microsoft’s industry and Azure cloud platform divisions, wrote in a blog post.
Diving knowledge:
Less than a year after the debut of ChatGPT, a game-changing “generative AI” tool created by Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI, a third of organizations regularly use such technologies in at least one business function, according to a survey global published. by McKinsey in August.
Nearly a quarter of C-suite executives surveyed said they personally use generative AI tools for work, and more than a quarter of respondents said the technology is already on their boards’ agendas.
Another 40% of respondents said their organizations planned to increase their investment in AI overall.
“Gen AI has captured the interest of the business population: people across regions, industries and seniority levels are using gen AI for work and outside of work,” McKinsey said in a report on the results of the poll.
Generative AI could enable the automation of up to 70% of business activities in nearly all occupations between now and 2030, adding trillions of dollars in value to the global economy, according to a September McKinsey paper .
Despite the positive outlook for AI, organizations face implementation challenges, according to the IDC report.
A shortage of skilled employees is holding back companies from accelerating their AI-based innovations, with 52% of respondents citing a lack of skilled workers needed to implement and scale AI initiatives across business functions as the top blocker, according to the report.
In a related study published by KPMG in September, roughly half (51%) of corporate executives said that, on average, they had not seen an increase in performance or return on digital transformation investments over the past 24 months, according to as previously reported by CFO Dive.
Forty-seven percent of respondents said a lack of governance and coordination is most likely to hinder a digital transformation project. Other top obstacles include lack of skills within the organization (41%); a risk-averse culture that is slow to accept change (40%); legacy technology limitations (39%); and cybersecurity or privacy issues (37%).
