The general public’s enthusiasm with AI can be measured through the Gartner Hype Cycle, a chart that graphs the life cycle of innovation. The chart bears a strong resemblance to a roller coaster, and we are currently riding along the first and tallest incline.
Of course, a roller coaster has highs and lows, and it remains to be seen just how AI will flow, but if historical patterns hold, the cycle predicts the excitement will ebb, as the momentum built by the “Innovation Trigger” will transform to the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and then the “Trough of Disillusionment” before going through two additional phases:
- Innovation Trigger: A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven.
- Peak of Inflated Expectations: Early publicity produces a number of success stories — often accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not.
- Trough of Disillusionment: Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.
- Slope of Enlightenment: More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to crystallize and become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation products appear from technology providers. More enterprises fund pilots; conservative companies remain cautious.
- Plateau of Productivity: Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology’s broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off.
The annual Gartner CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey “probed how leaders are reacting to the highly visible rise of AI, particularly GenAI,” according to Gartner Inc.
The company helps IT professionals with their decision-making, by supplying them with data visualization and analysis of various sectors. Gartner uses a chart, with the “Y” axis as expectations, and the “X” axis as time. Expectations are tracked over time. Gartner Inc. is currently tracking 95 innovative fields with its Gartner Hype Cycle, and AI is perhaps the most interesting and captivating one.
Gartner’s survey asks technology CEOs which technology they believe will most impact their industries over the next three years. AI was at the top of that list, garnering 59%. Digitalization, automation, carbon capture and control and data analytics were the other industries in the top five, respectively.
Additionally, Gartner measured other things such as expected implementation. In a poll asking the same group of CEOs, what their “expected company productivity change from use of GenAI was over the next two years,” 36% said they expected productivity to increase by more than 15%. Twenty percent expected productivity to increase by 11-15%, 26% expected productivity to increase by 6-10%, and 16% expected productivity to increase by 1-5%. Only three percent expected productivity to decrease as a result of implementation of AI in the workplace.
Ms. Mary Mesaglio, a vice president and analyst with Gartner, said the CEO survey reveals several things in regard to AI. “The first thing is that CEOs are really intimate with this technology, and to understand what I mean by that, think of the other technologies that have made the news or have been important for business, maybe quantum computing or the metaverse, or back when ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) was a big deal or cloud computing. CEOs understood those technologies, but they understood them intellectually. CEOs have a personal understanding of Generative AI, when we asked how many of them used Generative AI in their jobs, roughly 40% said they’ve used ChatGPT in the last six months to do their jobs. So, their understanding of these technologies is much more personal, much deeper, much more intimate. The last time we saw anything like this was in 2012, with the introduction of the iPad. It’s the only other time that we’ve seen CEOs adopt within six months of the interaction; that iPad, large percentage of CEO’s had one within six months of adoption. And this is like that.”
She said CEOs clearly see AI as a productivity enhancer, but struggle with how AI might transform their customer value proposition, because the relationship with the growth of the company, typically the top consideration of CEOs, is indirect, as the AI impact is internal. In previous technologies, such as in banking, mobile apps and other tools were external. She said the understanding by CEOs of the impact of AI on the customer value proposition is still early, even “fuzzy” but that it may change over time.
David Furlonger, a Gartner VP Analyst, said “It is important to remember that CEOs in particular (compared to other job roles that Gartner regularly surveys, such as CIOs) tend to be optimistic and bullish when asked about any novel area they hope and intend their company to make progress in. Eighty-seven percent of CEOs agree that the benefits of AI to their business outweigh its risks. We know this is not a trivial observation by CEOs. They have been considering the pros and cons quite carefully.”
A study earlier this year conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Management Sloan School, revealed that AI is being adopted unevenly in the U.S., “with use clustered in large companies and industries such as manufacturing and health care. That study relied on a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is embedded with information from the U.S. Census Bureau.
According to the Bureau, only 3.8% of businesses use AI to produce goods and services, and the highest use of the technology is in the information sector. “Businesses in the Information sector reported greater levels of AI use than the national average: 13.8% of businesses indicated that they were currently using the technology.”
