Is AI (artificial intelligence) all it is hyped up to be? New research suggests the answer is both yes and no. Today let’s dig into what is happening with enterprise adoption of AI—and perhaps more importantly what is not happening.
This new research comes from IBM, which surveyed a representative sample of 8,584 IT professionals in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, UAE, UK, U.S., and LATAM (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru). To participate, respondents had to be employed full-time, work at companies with more than 1 employee, work in a manager or higher-level role, and have at least some knowledge about how IT operates and is used by their company.
The results were interesting to say the least. Roughly 42% of respondents have actively deployed AI in their business while an additional 40% are exploring or experimenting with AI but have not deployed their models.
There are barriers that are keeping 40% of companies in that exploration phase with AI including limited skills and expertise, too much data complexity, ethical concerns, AI projects that are too difficult to integrate and scale, high price, and lack of tools for AI model development.
We have written about the impact of artificial intelligence many times here at Connected World and Constructech.The technology can help to speed up processes, improve customer service, and ultimately win more bids. I am still a believer AI is going to be successful because it has a lot of help because it’s big sister IoT (Internet of Things) jumpstarted its data success.
We see some of the best uses of AI include responding to email, answering financial questions, planning travel itinerary, preparing for a job interview, and for interacting with customers. In fact, AIPRM suggests the most common use of AI in business is for customer service.
For construction specifically, it can provide data for preventative and predictive maintenance. It can help reduce those tedious and manual tasks that can slow a jobsite down. But there are still many very real hurdles that we must overcome to get the most out of it.
The way I see it, this is probably one of the biggest challenges we currently face with AI: the skills shortage. And the numbers back me up here: One-in-five organizations report they do not have employees with the right skills in place to use new AI or automation tools and 16% cannot find new hires with the skills to address that gap. What’s more, only 34% are currently training or reskilling employees to work together with new automation and AI tools. Yikes.
We need to be actively doing something to combat this. We need to be training, mentoring, reskilling, and upskilling our workers. . We can leave the manual or repetitive tasks to the robots, but we need to ensure our employees have the right skillset to use these new tools.
The future is certainly bright with AI—but only if we properly prepare our workforce for what comes next in this new world of intelligence.
Want to tweet about this article? Use hashtags #construction #IoT #sustainability #AI #5G #cloud #edge #futureofwork #infrastructure