SANTA CLARA, Calif., July 30, 2024 — Cloudera announced today the results of its investigation, The State of Artificial Intelligence in Business and Modern Data ArchitectureThe report, which is based on a survey of 600 IT leaders across the US, EMEA and APAC, explored the challenges and barriers that exist for enterprise AI adoption in global businesses and current applications.
The study also examined AI adoption plans, the state of data infrastructure, and the benefits of hybrid data management versus enterprise AI adoption. The survey found that while a large majority of companies are adopting AI to some extent (88%), many still lack the data infrastructure and employee skills needed to truly leverage it.
In recent years, AI has become a global phenomenon, driven in part by its ability to power business operations, enable informed decision-making, accelerate innovation, and improve employee and customer experiences. However, not all organizations have been able to capitalize on this. The survey found that the top barriers to AI adoption were concerns about the security and compliance risks of AI (74%), lack of training or talent to manage AI tools (38%), and the high cost of AI tools (26%). These findings indicate that despite the rapid adoption of AI, many pillars of a resilient AI strategy are being overlooked or forgotten.
One of the key findings of the survey is that all AI efforts ultimately rely on trusted data. While 94% of respondents said they trust their data, 55% also said they would rather have surgery than try to access all of their company’s data. This frustration is due to challenges such as conflicting data sets (49%), an inability to manage data across multiple platforms (36%), and too much data (35%). These areas of frustration indicate that many companies may be lacking a modern data architecture that enables organization-wide access to data, regardless of where it resides, in a secure, accessible, and reliable manner.
From automating and streamlining IT processes to creating chatbots that can quickly and efficiently address frontline customer needs to leveraging analytics to drive better decision-making, the survey found that top AI use cases included improving customer experience (60%), increasing operational efficiency (57%) and accelerating analytics (51%).
- Improving the customer experience:Businesses are applying AI technology to improve security and fraud detection (59%), automate aspects of customer support (58%), leverage predictive customer service (57%), and power chatbots (55%), all with the goal of providing customers with a safer, simpler, and more intuitive experience.
- Increase operational efficiency:AI is being integrated into nearly every aspect of business. The survey found that IT isn’t the only one using AI: 52% of respondents said they’re using it for customer service, such as more informed chatbots, and 45% said it’s being used for marketing, such as analyzing call center data to offer more targeted incentives to customers.
- Speed up analysis:Faster, easier, and more reliable access to analytics enables more informed decision-making, giving companies that leverage AI a competitive advantage. Nearly 80% of respondents said it was “definitely” or “very” true that their company uses all the data at its disposal to make smarter business decisions. This data provides mission-critical insights, so access to all of an organization’s data is essential.
“For the majority of companies, their data quality is not great, it’s spread across different infrastructures and not documented effectively, and we see the consequences of that in the challenges identified by the survey,” said Abhas Ricky, chief strategy officer at Cloudera. “Managing data where it lives is the most important thing when it comes to adopting AI – being able to cost-effectively run models where that data already lives. Instead of bringing data to models, companies are starting to understand the benefits of bringing AI models to their data.”
Cloudera is the only true open hybrid data lake that brings analytics and AI to enterprise data. With over 25 exabytes of data under management, on par with industry hyperscalers, Cloudera is uniquely positioned to help enterprises organize and manage their data efficiently and securely, so they can harness the power of that data, trust its accuracy, and rely on it for analysis and business decisions.
To download the full report, Click here.
Methodology
The survey, commissioned by Cloudera and conducted by Researchscape, examines the views of 600 IT leaders based in the US, EMEA and APAC who work at companies with more than 1,000 employees. The survey was conducted in April and May 2024. The survey results were weighted to be representative of the overall GDP of the countries surveyed.
About Cloudera
Cloudera is the only true hybrid platform for data, analytics, and AI. With 100x more data under management than other cloud-only providers, Cloudera enables global enterprises to transform data of any type, on any public or private cloud, into valuable, trusted insights. Our open data lake delivers scalable, secure data management with portable, cloud-native analytics, enabling customers to embed GenAI models in their data while preserving privacy and ensuring responsible, trusted AI deployments. The world’s leading brands in financial services, insurance, media, manufacturing, and government rely on Cloudera to use their data to solve the impossible, today and tomorrow.
Source: Cloudera
