Generative AI in the Enterprise
Generative AI has been the biggest technology story of 2023. Almost everybody’s played with ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, GitHub Copilot, or Midjourney. A few have even tried out Bard or Claude, or run LLaMA1 on their laptop. And everyone has opinions about how these language models and art generation programs are going to change the nature of work, usher in the singularity, or perhaps even doom the human race. In enterprises, we’ve seen everything from wholesale adoption to policies that severely restrict or even forbid the use of generative AI.
What’s the reality? We wanted to find out what people are actually doing, so in September we surveyed O’Reilly’s users. Our survey focused on how companies use generative AI, what bottlenecks they see in adoption, and what skills gaps need to be addressed.
Executive Summary
We’ve never seen a technology adopted as fast as generative AI—it’s hard to believe that ChatGPT is barely a year old. As of November 2023:
- Two-thirds (67%) of our survey respondents report that their companies are using generative AI.
- AI users say that AI programming (66%) and data analysis (59%) are the most needed skills.
- Many AI adopters are still in the early stages. 26% have been working with AI for under a year. But 18% already have applications in production.
- Difficulty finding appropriate use cases is the biggest bar to adoption for both users and nonusers.
- 16% of respondents working with AI are using open source models.
- Unexpected outcomes, security, safety, fairness and bias, and privacy are the biggest risks for which adopters are testing.
- 54% of AI users expect AI’s biggest benefit will be greater productivity. Only 4% pointed to lower head counts.
Is generative AI at the top of the hype curve? We see plenty of room for growth, particularly as adopters discover new use cases and reimagine how they do business.
Source: https://www.oreilly.com/radar/generative-ai-in-the-enterprise/