A recent research report commissioned by Hewlett Packard Enterprise surveyed more than 2,000 IT leaders from 14 countries and found that while globally, AI investments are growing, businesses are overlooking key areas, including low data maturity levels, possible deficiencies in their networking and compute provisioning, and vital ethics and compliance considerations.
Indeed, the report found that 44 per cent of IT leaders surveyed believe their organisations are fully set up to realise the benefits of AI but have critical gaps in their strategies.
This includes a lack of alignment between processes and metrics, which it said results in consequential fragmentation in approach, furthe exacerbating delivery issues.
The report also uncovered significant disconnects in strategy and understanding that could adversely affect future return on investment (ROI).
Only a small percentage (7 per cent) of organisations can run real-time data pushes/pulls to enable innovation and external data monetisation, while just 26 per cent have set up data governance models and can run advanced analytics.
Further, fewer than six in 10 respondents said their organisation is completely capable of handling any of the key stages of data preparation for use in AI models – from accessing (59 per cent) and storing (57 per cent) to processing (55 per cent) and recovering (51 per cent).
Over a quarter (28 per cent) of IT leaders describe their organisation’s overall AI approach as “fragmented,” and over a third (35 per cent) of organisations have chosen to create separate AI strategies for individual functions; 32 per cent are creating different sets of goals altogether, it shared.
Ethics and compliance are also being completely overlooked, the research found, despite growing scrutiny around ethics and compliance from consumers and regulatory bodies.
The research showed that legal/compliance (13 per cent) and ethics (11 per cent) were deemed by IT leaders to be the “least critical” for AI success.
In addition, the results revealed that almost one in four organisations (22 per cent) aren’t involving legal teams in their business’s AI strategy conversations at all.
It noted that without proper AI ethics and compliance, businesses run the risk of exposing their proprietary data.
Among the issues, businesses lacking an AI ethics policy risk developing models that lack proper compliance and diversity standards, which can negatively impact the company’s brand, result in a loss in sales or lead to costly fines and legal battles.
Read the full report here.