Bombay: A new study commissioned by IBM found that around 59% of enterprise-scale organizations (1,000+ employees) surveyed in India are actively using AI in their businesses. THE ‘IBM Global AI Adoption Index 2023» found that early adopters are leading the way, with 74% of Indian companies already working with AI, having accelerated their investments in AI over the last 24 months in areas such as R&D and reskilling. workforce.
Persistent challenges to AI adoption remain, including recruiting employees with appropriate skills and ethical concerns, which prevent companies from adopting AI technologies into their operations. Therefore, in 2024, addressing these inhibitors would be a priority, such as providing individuals with the skills to work with AI and having a strong governance framework for AI.
“The increase in AI adoption and investment by Indian companies is a good indicator that they are already enjoying the benefits of AI. However, there is still a significant opportunity to accelerate, as many companies are hesitant to move beyond experimentation and deploy AI at scale. To realize its full potential in the coming months, data and AI governance tools will be essential to responsibly creating AI models that businesses can trust and adopt with confidence. Without the use of governance tools, AI can expose businesses to data privacy issues, legal complications, and ethical dilemmas – instances of which we have already seen many across the world. said Sandip Patel Managing Director, IBM India and South Asia.
Highlights for India’IBM Global AI Adoption Index 2023» carried out by Morning Consult on behalf of IBM:
Over the past few years, AI adoption has remained stable across large organizations surveyed:
Today, 59% of IT professionals in large organizations say they have actively deployed AI, while an additional 27% are actively exploring the use of this technology.
Similarly, about 6 in 10 enterprise IT professionals say their company is actively implementing generative AI and 34% are exploring it.
74% of IT professionals at companies deploying or exploring AI say their company has accelerated its investment or deployment in AI over the past 24 months in areas such as R&D (67%), workforce reskilling/development (55%) and creation of proprietary AI. solutions (53%).
Easier-to-use AI tools and the need to reduce costs and automate processes are driving AI adoption among surveyed companies:
Advances in AI tools that make them more accessible (59%), the need to reduce costs and automate key processes (48%), and the increasing amount of AI integrated into standard business applications (47% ) are the main factors. drive the adoption of AI.
Lack of skills remains the biggest barrier to AI adoption in India: Top 5 barriers to successful AI adoption in companies exploring or deploying AI are skills and expertise limited in AI (30%), lack of tools/platforms to develop AI models (28). %), AI projects are too complex or difficult to integrate and scale (27%), ethical concerns (26%), and too much data complexity (25%).
The need for trusted, governed AI is well understood, but barriers make it difficult to put into practice for companies surveyed in India:
IT professionals largely agree that consumers are more likely to choose services from companies with transparent and ethical AI practices (98% strongly or somewhat agree), and 94 % say that being able to explain how their AI made a decision is important to their business (among companies exploring or deploying AI).
However, despite understanding its importance, only a minority are taking key steps to achieve trustworthy AI, such as reducing bias (36%), tracking data provenance (46%), ensuring it can explain the decisions of its AI models (52%) or develop ethical policies regarding AI (46%).
The main barriers to developing trustworthy and ethical AI are the lack of an AI strategy (57%), lack of corporate guidelines (55%), and lack of AI governance and management tools. AI working in all data environments (55%).
Among surveyed organizations in India, AI is already impacting the workforce:
Among companies citing the use of AI to address labor or skills shortages, they are leveraging AI to do things like reduce manual or repetitive tasks with automation tools (63% ), automate customer responses and self-service actions (63%) or use AI to improve recruitment and human resources (56%). 46% are currently training or upskilling their employees to work together with new automation and AI tools. 51% say employees in their organization are excited to work with new AI and automation tools.
