A global survey of 351 CEOs suggests organizations are prioritizing artificial intelligence (AI) investment in customer experience (87%) over most other technology investments.
Conducted by WSJ Intelligence on behalf of NTT, the survey finds an equal percentage have identified an urgent need for AI governance frameworks, with data privacy and cybersecurity emerging as primary concerns.
Overall, 89% ranked AI as their most vital technology for future competitiveness, with 77% planning to increase AI budgets in 2025. Overall, slightly less (70%) said they intend to increase technology budgets more broadly.
However, only 8% of respondents said they expect AI to enhance IT operations and only 22% are prioritizing AI-augmented software development. In comparison, investments in generative AI (GenAI) ranked first (44%), followed by Internet of Things (IoT) at 25% and cloud computing at 22%.
The survey makes it clear that organizations are going to prioritize AI investments by their potential impact on revenue and profitability, says Vito Mabrucco, global chief marketing officer for NTT.
However, among the 70% of CEOs who consider AI a “crucial” technology, also identified data privacy as a top concern, while 38% listed cybersecurity as a top concern. A third (33%) also noted that compliance is a key challenge.
The challenge is finding a way to achieve those goals while limiting potential risks, he adds. “No one wants to slow down,” says Mabrucco.
The pace at which organizations are successfully operationalizing AI will vary widely from one organization to another. However, it would appear that given the costs involved, business and IT leaders need to be able to justify a return on those investments. They might still be able to get funding for a proof-of-concept (PoC) involving a use case for AI, but most organizations will initially need to focus on a relatively small number of applications that have the most potential to provide a competitive advantage.
The issue, of course, is the pace of AI innovation is occurring so rapidly that many initiatives that might have initially seemed like they might prove to be a game-changer are determined later to simply be table stakes required to remain competitive.
In fact, instances of places AI is being applied to provide a sustainable competitive advantage might be rare given the ability of organizations to invoke AI models as a service. Each iteration of those AI models provides access to more advanced reasoning capabilities that make it feasible for organizations to rapidly leapfrog each other in terms of infusing AI into business processes.
Ultimately, it’s hard to conceive of a business process that won’t be transformed by AI to one degree or another. Expectations, however, will need to be closely managed given the inherent probabilistic nature of generative AI technologies. A GenAI model rarely surfaces the same output in the exact same way, which can be problematic within the context of a deterministic process that is expected to be performed the same way every time.
In the final analysis, however, there will be an AI agent for almost every type of task imaginable. Depending on the nature of the tasks assigned, however, exactly how helpful those AI agents are is likely to be considerably different.
