The number of enterprises implementing artificial intelligence (AI) grew 270 percent during the past four years—and tripled in the past year, new research from Gartner has found.
According to the “2019 Gartner CIO Survey,” the biggest AI challenge enterprises face is an acute talent shortage—cited by fifty-four percent of respondents—while maturing AI capabilities have enabled more significant benefits from deployment.
“We still remain far from general AI that can wholly take over complex tasks, but we have now entered the realm of AI-augmented work and decision science—what we call ‘augmented intelligence,’” said Chris Howard, a research VP at Gartner, in a statement. “If you are a CIO and your organization doesn’t use AI, chances are high that your competitors do and this should be a concern.”
According to the survey, CIOs have realized that synergies exist between sustainable digital transformation and task automation.
“AI has become an integral part of every digital strategy and is already used in a variety of applications,” Gartner said. “Survey results show that 52 percent of telco organizations deploy chatbots and 38 percent of healthcare providers rely on computer-assisted diagnostics. Other operational use cases for AI are fraud protection and consumer fragmentation.”
For the survey, Gartner gathered data from more than 3,000 CIOs in 89 countries across significant industries, representing $284 billion in IT spending.
In mid-2018, Gartner estimated that the business value created by AI would reach $3.9 trillion in 2022.
