Dive Brief:
- IT leaders are uncertain about their organization’s ability to support AI’s growing use and demands, according to an Equinix survey published Wednesday.
- Upwards of 2 in 5 IT professionals are not very comfortable with their organization’s ability to accommodate the growing use of AI and are concerned about the capacity of their infrastructure and team, according to the survey of more than 2,900 IT decision makers around the world.
- Despite not feeling comfortable, more than 4 in 5 IT leaders plan to implement AI in IT operations, according to the report. Adopting AI in cybersecurity, customer experience, and research and development were identified as other highly-pursued areas of implementation.
Dive Insight:
For the average organization, there are several roadblocks to generative AI adoption. Businesses need to have proper data gathering and quality measures, governance models, a mature enough tech stack and the budget to support the required computing power.
Many vendors have added capabilities to try and fill the gaps for businesses. OpenAI has lowered costs to operate its ChatGPT API model, it's embeddings model and other GPT-based models. AWS partnered with Hugging Face to make it easier for IT teams to deploy and fine-tune large language models for generative AI applications.
There is pressure on IT leaders to keep up with advancing technology, such as AI, even when there are more pressing issues like data security. In an all too familiar battle for tech leaders, they are being challenged to strike a balance between maintaining current systems and experimenting with new tech.
Chobani, for example, is currently going through a multiyear digital transformation. The teams are implementing new systems and tools to support the company’s tech foundation. With that in mind, Chobani is taking a more cautious approach to generative AI, staying, for now, in the early experimental phase.
“We have to be careful,” Parag Agrawal, CIO at Chobani, said. “We have been telling our organization that, ‘Hey, play around with ChatGPT, but be careful, we’re not ready to use it at an enterprise level.'”
Some large organizations have chosen to invest heavily in AI to bolster what they can offer customers as well as internally. Accenture plans to invest $3 billion over three years in its data and AI practice as well as double its AI workforce to reach 80,000 AI-skilled employees.
