67% of IT leaders say AI can increase employee efficiency

A new survey conducted by AMD found that 67% of IT leaders believe AI can increase employee efficiency. This could be good news in a fast-changing world where many believe AI will replace IT workers, leaving them jobless.

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AMD just released its findings from a survey of 2,500 global IT leaders. The survey discussed enterprise AI adoption and the leaders’ current priorities for their IT departments. The results show that 68% of leaders favor using AI to “help work models run more efficiently.”

That optimism is notable given that the survey also found that over 50% of IT leaders haven’t yet experimented with the newest natural language processing (NLP) applications, like ChatGPT, Bing AI, Google Bard, and others.   

Over 50% of IT leaders also indicated that their organizations are not ready to implement AI right now and that a five-year plan to build AI into the enterprise fully is the best course of action. Even so, over two-thirds of IT leaders are already amassing budgets for AI project implementation. 

The use of AI tools has grown exponentially over the past eight months since the launch of ChatGPT. This may explain why IT leaders believe organizations can’t keep up with enterprise AI adoption. 

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The three biggest factors standing in the way of widespread AI adoption in their departments are security risks, lack of IT infrastructure to handle AI workloads, and the fact that people still need to be trained. 

“Security is a big consideration as we deal with lots of sensitive consumer data, and we need to be confident this can be secured,” one of the survey’s IT leaders explained when discussing some roadblocks for wide enterprise AI adoption. 

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The wariness in adopting AI fully into the enterprise is not surprising, as many companies aren’t confident in the new technology and choose to leave it out of their top priorities. Of the IT leaders prioritizing AI, 90% already see improved workplace efficiency, and most believe they can address security and efficiency issues and improve the automated detection capabilities of cybersecurity threats. 

However, the AMD survey also found that the current top priority for 66% of IT leaders is increasing system speed and performance, but bolstering data privacy and security was a close second.