Gen AI: From Value to ROI, SecurelyGen AI: From Value to ROI, Securely
A recent survey shows that the concerns enterprise professionals have about AI have shifted from “Why AI?” to “How can we use it securely?”
June 7, 2024
If your enterprise isn’t using Generative AI yet, you’re not alone – but soon you may be pretty nearly so.
A new survey by consulting firm Altman Solon found that 65% of U.S.-based enterprises are currently using Gen AI tools, up from just 11% last year. What’s more, the survey projects that next year, 91% will use Gen AI, and by 2027, 100% of those surveyed said they expect to be using Gen AI tools.
Another indication that enterprises are getting serious about Gen AI: Altman Solon found that last year’s biggest perceived risk—unclear value—fell from 68% to just 28% this year. This year’s biggest risk, cited by 72%, is data security, up from 32% last year. Taken together, these two statistics seem to suggest that enterprises are identifying use cases, and now are focused on the biggest practical obstacle to those applications, namely the inherent challenges posed by the technology itself, and how it gets implemented.
There are a few things to note here. While this survey finds enterprises less worried about Gen AI providing value somewhere, other reports suggest that enterprises may still struggle to understand the costs that their Gen AI deployments will impose and therefore the ROI that a given use case will deliver. Enterprises face a process of identifying a universe of potential use cases, narrowing them down to those that provide value, and then testing those scenarios against the cost to deploy and maintain them.
Another point: Altman Solon defines “security” fairly broadly, embracing what many people might describe as governance. Among the concerns the survey report highlights are copyright, data residency, and hallucinations, in addition to the ways Gen AI could open up new avenues for security breaches, for example in the course of training large language models (LLMs).
All of these critical topics will be under discussion at our new Enterprise Connect AIevent Oct. 1 – 2 in Santa Clara, CA. We’ve launched the first set of breakout sessions, including several that focus on value, ROI, and security/compliance:
We’ll continue to add sessions to the program, and we’ve also just announced our first keynoter, David Glick, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Business Services at Walmart. So please stay tuned, and I hope to see you in Santa Clara this October!
