Enterprise AI adoption soars almost 90 percent

For some time now AI has been the go-to technology to enable informed decision making, accelerate innovation, and enhance experiences for both employees and customers.

A new report from Cloudera shows that 88 percent of enterprises are adopting AI in some capacity, but many are still lacking the necessary data infrastructure and employee skills to truly benefit from it.

It finds the top barriers to adopting AI are worries about the security and compliance risks that AI presents (74 percent), not having the proper training or talent to manage AI tools (38 percent), and AI tools being too expensive (26 percent).

Interestingly, all AI efforts are ultimately vulnerable to trustworthy data. While 94 percent of respondents say that they trust their data, 55 percent also say they would rather get root canal work than try to access all of their company’s data. This frustration is driven by challenges including contradictory datasets (49 percent), an inability to govern data across platforms (36 percent), and too much data (35 percent).

Yet despite this nearly 80 percent of respondents said it is either 'completely' or 'very' true that their company is using all of the data at its disposal to make smarter business decisions. This data provides mission critical information, so access to all of an organization's data is critical.

"For the majority of companies, the quality of their data is not great, it's distributed across various infrastructures and not documented in an efficient manner, and we're seeing the fallout from that presented in the challenges identified by the survey," says Cloudera’s chief strategy officer, Abhas Ricky. "Managing data where it resides is the most important thing when it comes to adopting AI -- being able to run models in a cost efficient manner where that data already lives. Instead of bringing the data to the models, enterprises are starting to realize the advantages of bringing AI models to their data."

Areas where AI is being adopted include enhancing security and fraud detection (59 percent), automate aspects of customer support (58 percent), leverage predictive customer service (57 percent), and power chatbots (55 percent), all with a goal of giving customers a safer, simpler, and more intuitive experience.

The full report is available from the Cloudera site.

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