Dive Brief:
- Nearly 3 in 5 U.S. employees believe C-suite and other senior leaders have been slow to embrace emerging technologies despite the value they could hold, according to an EY report published Monday. The report polled 1,001 employees familiar with emerging technologies.
- Three-quarters of survey respondents say their companies have either initiated adoption or fully adopted one or more emerging technologies in the last three years.
- More than half of employees believe emerging technologies are out of date once they reach the point of full adoption, according to the report.
Dive Insight:
IT leaders grapple with two opposing forces: increased appetite for newer technologies and potential risks of rapid adoption.
Results indicate part of the friction comes from top executives, as nearly two thirds of managers believed senior leaders were slow to embrace emerging tech.
Enterprise adoption has historically lagged behind technology innovation, according to Matt Barrington, EY Americas emerging technology leader.
Generative AI, a recent example of emerging tech garnering mainstream interest, is "drawing a parallel once again to enterprises needing to speed up their ability to understand how to adopt and harness the power of emerging technologies," Barrington told CIO Dive.
Lists of pending to-do’s elsewhere in the tech stack slow down the pace of adoption for some companies. Deployments of new tech may not be possible until certain modernization tasks are completed, a roadblock that isn’t typically visible outside of IT.
"Our clients who have adopted a forward-thinking posture have the underpinnings to adopt a lot of the other emerging tech capabilities at a much faster clip rate than those who have not," said Barrington.
