Artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential to accelerate transformational change across businesses and industries is becoming clear.\u00a0 What is less clear is how early adopter organisations are using these new technology solutions, and what sets them apart as early adopters.\u00a0 The Artificial Intelligence Report, conducted by EY, aims for a deeper understanding of how companies are considering AI solutions in their organisations and gain insights into how they are addressing the challenges and opportunities ahead.<\/p>\n
We received input from business leaders in 277 companies, across 7 sectors and 15 countries in Europe, 20 were from Ireland.<\/p>\n
More companies from Ireland report that AI is currently an important topic for their C-suite executives than the European aggregate. Across all countries, 71%<\/strong> of the companies respond that AI is considered an important topic on the executive management level<\/strong>. This is significantly higher than on the non-managerial \/ employee level where AI is only considered an important topic in 28% of the companies. Interestingly, Board of Directors also came out lower with \u2018only\u2019 38% of respondees reporting that AI is important to their board.<\/p>\n 71% of the companies respond that AI is considered \u2018an important topic\u2019 on the executive management level<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 89%<\/strong> of all respondents, 85% in Ireland, expect AI to generate business benefits by optimising their companies\u2019 operations in the future<\/strong>. This is followed by 74%<\/strong> that expect AI to be key to engaging customers.<\/strong> This can be done\u00a0by enhancing the user experience, tailoring content, increasing response speed, adding sentiment, creating experiences, etc. C-suite respondents scored \u2018engaging customers\u2019 highest of the AI benefit areas. 100% of the most advanced companies expect AI will help them engage customers, compared to only 63% of the less mature companies. Using AI to \u2018transform products and services\u2019 comes out slightly lower with 65%. \u2018Empowering employees\u2019 comes out the lowest with 60% of the companies expecting AI-generated benefits in that area.<\/p>\n 56%<\/strong> of all the companies expect AI to have a high or a very high impact on business areas that are \u201centirely unknown to the company today\u201d<\/strong>. Similarly, 65% of all respondents, expect AI to have a high or a very high impact on the core business. With AI presumably pushing companies into totally new domains in the future, it is perhaps not surprising that AI is receiving attention as a key topic for executive management.<\/p>\n Despite the apparent sizable impact that companies expect from AI, only a very small proportion of companies, constituting 4%<\/strong> of the total sample, self-report that AI is actively contributing<\/strong> to \u2018many processes in the company and enabling quite advanced tasks today\u2019 (referred to as \u2018most advanced\u2019 in this report).<\/p>\n Only 4% of the companies are actively using AI in \u2018many processes and to enable advanced tasks\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Another 28% are in the \u2018released\u2019 stage where they have put AI selectively to active use in one or a few processes in the company. The majority, 51%<\/strong> of companies, 75% in Ireland, are still only planning for AI or are in early stage pilots<\/strong>. 7% of companies are self-rated as least mature, indicating that they are not yet thinking about AI at this stage.<\/p>\n The most widely reported adoption of AI (47%) was in the IT\/Technology function, followed by R&D with 36%, and customer service with 24%. Interestingly, several functions are hardly using AI at all<\/strong>; most notably, the procurement function, where only 4% of the companies currently use AI. This is followed by HR with 7% and product management with 9%. This is perhaps surprising, given the many use cases and applicable solutions in these functional areas.<\/p>\n When asking the respondents to rank the importance of 8 capabilities to enable AI in their businesses, \u2018advanced analytics\u2019 and \u2018data management\u2019<\/strong> emerged as the most important<\/strong>. \u2018AI leadership\u2019 and having an \u2018open culture\u2019 followed.<\/p>\n When self-assessing the capabilities where the companies are least competent, they point to emotional intelligence and AI leadership. AI leadership is defined as the ability to lead an AI transformation by articulating a vision, setting goals and securing broad buy-in across the organisation. To summarise, the challenge ahead appears to be as much about culture and leadership as it is about data, analytics, and technology.<\/p>\n Kieran McCorry<\/p>\n National Technology Officer for Microsoft Ireland<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential to accelerate transformational change across businesses and industries is becoming clear.\u00a0 What is less clear is how early adopter organisations are using these new technology solutions, and what sets them apart as early adopters.\u00a0 The Artificial Intelligence Report, conducted by EY, aims for a deeper understanding of how companies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":838,"featured_media":157499,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"class_list":["post-157670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","specials-transform-en-ie","stories-data-insights-intelligence-en-ie","stories-how-can-i-use-ai-en-ie-data-insights-intelligence-en-ie","businessPriorities-data-ai-en-ie","businessPriorities-digital-transformation-en-ie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pulse.microsoft.com\/en-ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157670"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pulse.microsoft.com\/en-ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pulse.microsoft.com\/en-ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pulse.microsoft.com\/en-ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/838"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pulse.microsoft.com\/en-ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157670"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/pulse.microsoft.com\/en-ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":239039,"href":"https:\/\/pulse.microsoft.com\/en-ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157670\/revisions\/239039"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pulse.microsoft.com\/en-ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pulse.microsoft.com\/en-ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pulse.microsoft.com\/en-ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Most impact on the business expected from \u2018optimising operations\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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