Organizations plan to use more AI in the next few years

A new survey from Snow Software reveals that 72 percent of IT leaders believe their organization will be using more AI in the next two to three years.

The poll of 800 IT leaders from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Australia set out to assess how IT decision makers' priorities have shifted over the past 12 months and outline their top areas of focus as they head into the new year.

Among the findings are that 32 percent of IT leaders say that integrating AI is the top priority in 2023, followed by reducing security risks (31 percent) and reducing IT costs (29 percent). In fact, 82 percent of IT leaders say they are completely prepared to leverage generative AI technologies, while 62 percent say they are seeing increased investments in emerging applications such as ChatGPT and Google Bard.

"There is no business as usual for IT leaders today," says Alastair Pooley, chief information officer at Snow. "Between navigating challenging economic conditions and the emergence of game-changing technologies like generative AI, the role of IT is in flux. The results of our latest report demonstrate that IT leaders are focused on providing cost efficiencies and mitigating risk without hampering the innovation agenda of the business. However, IT leaders seem to lack the foundation of visibility required to strike the right balance for their organizations, as 67 percent of those surveyed said they believe the business is procuring more SaaS and cloud technologies than they are aware of. While many IT leaders are exploring AI capabilities within technology investments they already have, we’ve seen, time and time again, that comprehensive visibility and actionable insights are required to get the most out of your technology investments."

Blancing cost against risk continues to present a challenge, 75 percent of IT leaders report an increase in investment in security tools in 2023, while 69 percent report increases in SaaS and 67 percent in cloud infrastructure. However, these same IT leaders also report overspending on cloud infrastructure (28 percent), cloud services (28 percent) and managed services (26 percent).

In addition 67 percent of IT leaders believe that the business is buying more SaaS and cloud technologies than they are aware of, and 75 percent recognize the risk of these visibility gaps. However, there is no one reason for visibility issues, a mix of cybersecurity protocols (38 percent), lack of resources such as budget or employees (32 percent) and lack of skills in the IT organization (29 percent) are contributing.

The full report is available from the Snow Software site.

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