Early adopters’ fast-tracking gen AI into production, according to new report

Organizations are fast-tracking generative AI pilots into production, anticipating the rewards of greater efficiency, improved personalization and customer experiences and more informed decision-making. 

One in four organizations say gen AI is critically important to gaining increased productivity and efficiency. Thirty percent say improving customer experience and personalization is their highest priority, and 26% say it’s the technology’s potential to improve decision-making that matters most. 

Dresner Advisory Services‘  Generative AI Report findings reflect how organizations are taking on the challenge of evaluating and adopting gen AI today. The study is global in scope and based on insights gained from Dresners’ research community of more than 8,000 organizations and access to vendors’ customer communities.

“The generative AI phenomenon has captured the attention of the market—and the world—with both positive and negative connotations,” said Howard Dresner, founder, and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory. “While generative AI adoption remains nascent in the near term, a strong majority of respondents indicate intentions to adopt it early or in the future.”

Priorities are rocket fuel moving pilots into production 

Building business cases around new technologies often fails to connect measurable revenue gains combined with time, cost or efficiency savings. Gen AI doesn’t have that problem. Its contributions during pilots aren’t lost in the terabytes of data a typical enterprise produces daily. 

The fact that gen AI’s pilots lend themselves well to building business cases further accelerates adoption, as the Dresner report alludes to in its many findings. 

Improving productivity and efficiency with marketing and IT departments planning to be the first adopters reflects where gen AI has the greatest potential to make immediate, measurable contributions. Improving customer experiences, personalization, and search quality are all marketing-centric priorities that together are moving pilots into production. Twenty-six percent of organizations say improved decision-making is the most critical priority that’s making gen AI a priority for them. 

Source: Dresner Advisory Services, 2024 Edition Generative AI Report

Data privacy dominates organizations’ most critical concerns in adopting gen AI. Nearly half of organizations consider data privacy to be a critical concern in their decision to adopt gen AI. Legal and regulatory compliance, the potential for unintended consequences, and ethics and bias concerns are also significant. Less than half of respondents—46% and 43%, respectively—consider costs and organizational policy important to generative AI adoption. Weaponized LLMs and attacks on chatbots fuel fears over data privacy. More organizations are fighting back and using gen AI to protect against chatbot leaks. 

Source: Dresner Advisory Services, 2024 Edition Generative AI Report

Industries most actively pursuing gen AI’s productivity gains 

Healthcare, manufacturing and education industries see the greatest potential for gen AI and lead all others in their interest to become early adopters. Given how large language models (LLMs) are proving adept at text-intensive tasks and their continued improvements point to even greater accuracy and speed gains, organizations from all industries are paying more attention. 

Gen AI has the potential to improve personalized medical care, solve many challenging manufacturing problems, and provide personalized education experiences at scale.  

Dresner’s research time also points out that the government sector is showing the highest level of caution, with 33% of respondents adopting a wait-and-see approach. Dresner’s research team notes concerns over data privacy, implementation strategies and the sector’s general hesitancy towards cutting-edge technologies. 

Source: Dresner Advisory Services, 2024 Edition Generative AI Report

Consumer services businesses lead all others in having gen AI in production. Nearly half of the consumer services firms interviewed (43%) have gen AI in production today. Technology, business services and healthcare industries have the next three highest levels of gen AI production. Education leads all other industries on experimentation, closely followed by healthcare, while government trails at 50%. The report notes that the government also reports the highest levels for planned use beyond 12 months and no planned use. 

Source: Dresner Advisory Services, 2024 Edition Generative AI Report

OpenAI is dominating cross-industry support, with four of the top five supported LLMs. GPT4, GPT3, AutoGPT and GPT2 are the top four LLMs that organizations across industries are supporting today. Google’s BERT is fifth, with just over 10% of organizations supporting it today. As more LLMs are introduced, organizations must define their use cases and requirements clearly to get the most out of their investments with their chosen LLM providers. Dresner’s research team implies in their research that the LLM market will eventually become more balkanized. LLM vendors will start focusing on vertical and differentiated use cases that provide differentiation in an increasingly crowded market.

Source: Dresner Advisory Services, 2024 Edition Generative AI Report