“While leaders agree using AI is a business imperative, and many say they won’t even hire someone without AI skills, they also believe that their companies lack a vision and plan to implement AI broadly; they’re stuck in AI inertia,” Colette Stallbaumer, general manager of Copilot and Cofounder of Work Lab at Microsoft, said in a pre-recorded briefing.
“We’ve come to the hard part of any tech disruption, moving from experimentation to business transformation,” Stallbaumer said.
While there’s clear interest in AI’s potential, many businesses are proceeding with caution with major deployments, say analysts.
“Most organizations are interested in testing and deployment, but they are unsure where and how to get the most return,” said Carolina Milanesi, president and principal analyst at Creative Strategies.
Security is among the biggest concerns, said Milanesi, “and until that is figured out, it is easier for organizations to shut access down.”
As companies start to deploy AI, IT teams face significant demands, said Josh Bersin, founder and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company. Deploying genAI tools puts the onus on IT staff to ensure data quality and security standards are in place, as well as “getting up to speed on the European AI Act, implementing governance, and helping to standardize on vendors and tools, if possible,” he said.
