An S&P Global Market Intelligence report commissioned by WEKA found that storage and data management issues are a problem area for enterprises implementing AI projects.
The second annual Global Trends in AI report surveyed more than 1,500 practitioners and decision-makers to identify underlying trends influencing AI adoption and implementation.
WEKA supplies parallel file system software that can be used to feed data to training and inferencing activities. Generative AI activity is spreading like wildfire and organizations are having to deal with implementation problems such as storage and data management architectures and GPU availability. There are regional disparities in availability, suggesting global AI demand is outpacing access to AI accelerators and GPUs needed to power AI projects.
John Abbott, principal research analyst at 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, said: “One of the most striking takeaways from our 2024 Trends In AI study is the astonishing rate of change that’s taken place since the onset of ChatGPT 3 and the first wave of generative AI models reached the market in early 2023. In less than two years, generative AI adoption has eclipsed all other AI applications in the enterprise, defining a new cohort of AI leaders and shaping an emergent market of specialty AI and GPU cloud providers.”
Findings include:
- 88 percent of organizations are actively investigating GenAI, far outstripping other applications such as prediction models (61 percent), classification (51 percent), expert systems (39 percent), and robotics (30 percent).
- 24 percent of organizations say they already see GenAI as an integrated capability deployed across their organization. 37 percent have generative AI in production but not yet scaled. Just 11 percent are not investing in generative AI at all.
- 33 percent of survey respondents have reached enterprise scale, with AI projects being widely implemented and driving significant business value, up from 28 percent last year.
- North America leads in enterprise AI adoption, with 48 percent of North American respondents indicating that AI is widely implemented, compared to APAC (26 percent) and EMEA (25 percent).
- Product improvement and operational effectiveness are key investment drivers, with organizations leveraging AI to improve product or service quality (42 percent), target increased revenue growth (39 percent), improve workforce productivity (40 percent) and IT efficiencies (41 percent), and accelerate their overall pace of innovation (39 percent).
The report found that the most frequently cited technological inhibitors to AI/ML deployments are storage and data management (35 percent) – significantly greater than computing (26 percent), security (23 percent), and networking (15 percent).
There is a sustainability angle, with nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of organizations saying they are concerned about the impact of AI/ML projects on their energy use and carbon footprint; 25 percent indicate they are very concerned. Some 42 percent of organizations indicated that they have invested in energy-efficient IT hardware/systems to address the potential environmental impacts of their AI initiatives over the past 12 months. Of those, 56 percent believe this has had a “high or very high” impact.
Liran Zvibel, cofounder and CEO at WEKA, said: “Like the internet, the smartphone, and cloud computing before it, AI represents a paradigm shift that will leave an indelible mark on business and society and is already defining a new generation of industry leaders and disruptors. Unlike past technology transitions, AI’s adoption and maturation are growing with unprecedented velocity.”
Read the full 2024 Global Trends in AI study from S&P Global Market Intelligence here.
