Gartner: ChatGPT Prompts and Increase in AI Investment

Sheryl_Wharff

70% of Organizations Currently in Exploration Mode with Generative AI

In a recent Gartner poll of more than 2,500 executive leaders, 45% reported that the publicity of ChatGPT has prompted them to increase artificial intelligence (AI) investments. Seventy percent of executives said that their organization is in investigation and exploration mode with generative AI, while 19% are in pilot or production mode.

“The generative AI frenzy shows no signs of abating,” said Frances Karamouzis, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. “Organizations are scrambling to determine how much cash to pour into generative AI solutions, which products are worth the investment, when to get started and how to mitigate the risks that come with this emerging technology.”

The poll was conducted among 2,544 respondents as part of a Gartner webinar series in March and April 2023 discussing the enterprise impact of ChatGPT and generative AI. Results of this poll do not represent global findings or the market as a whole.

“AI & ML can’t instantly automate all your decisions, said Felix Hoddinott, Chief Analytics Officer, Quantexa, but with the right data, in the right context, with the resulting connections, it can make decision making easier, quicker, and more informed. Quantexa believes decisions at strategic, operational, and tactical levels which are enriched by context create greater insight and confidence. Context on what the data means. Confidence that your data is meaningful. And the ability to connect that data from siloed and scattered points and turn it into a trusted, reusable resource is essential. We see the world’s leading organizations turning to Quantexa to use the speed and accuracy of its Decision Intelligence Platform to establish confidence in their data, reach new levels of organizational efficiency, and build business resiliency. AI and ML are being leveraged for both competitive and predictive insights as part of the overall solution.”

Executives Say Benefits of Generative AI Outweigh the Risks

The poll found that 68% of executives believe that the benefits of generative AI outweigh the risks, compared with just 5% that feel the risks outweigh the benefits. However, executives may begin to shift their perspective as investments deepen.

“Initial enthusiasm for a new technology can give way to more rigorous analysis of risks and implementation challenges,” said Karamouzis. “Organizations will likely encounter a host of trust, risk, security, privacy and ethical questions as they start to develop and deploy generative AI.”

Customer Experience is the Primary Focus of Generative AI Investments

Despite ongoing economic headwinds, only 17% of executives indicated cost optimization as the primary purpose of generative AI investments. Customer experience was the most common primary focus of investments, cited by 38% of respondents (see Figure 1).

Ray Pasquale, the CEO and Founder of Unified Office said, "We’ve been making use of AI quite some time as part of our core offerings such as our sentiment and predictive analysis products which help businesses operate more effectively giving them insights into their business operations they didn’t have before. We’re also delving into the robotics realm where we expect AI to play a really important role in terms of human interaction. It remains to be seen however just how effective generative AI will be beyond assisting with content creation, programming templates and the like."

Fig. 1: Primary Focus of Generative AI Investments (Percentage of Respondents)

As organizations begin experimenting with generative AI, many are starting with use cases such as media content improvement or code generation. While these efforts can be a strong initial value-add, generative AI has vast potential to support solutions that augment humans or machines and autonomously execute business and IT processes.

“Autonomous business, the next macrophase of technological change, can mitigate the impact of inflation, talent shortages and even economic downturns,” said Karamouzis. “CEOs and CIOs that leverage generative AI to drive transformation through new products and business models will find massive opportunities for revenue growth."

According to Akshay Sharma, CTO, Kovair Software, and former Gartner Analyst, “We agree with the Gartner findings that organizations will likely encounter a host of trust, risk, security, privacy and ethical questions as they start to develop and deploy generative AI. Having personally completed a computer engineering thesis on neural networks, AI promises huge productivity gains, but there are risks which can be addressed.

Oversight and Governance Controllers are needed, based on old school knowledge and experience. Human oversight is needed but humans can’t keep up with all the transactions and decisions that the AI/ML systems will do. Before Neural Networks from Hinton, Hopfield, and others came about, AI was based on old school algorithms, probabilistic models and rules-based systems in what was called Expert Systems!

A hybrid approach in a Governance Controller can occur, where “rules” are enforced, but as we know there’s many ethical “shades of gray!” These can be adapted weightings in what’s known as “fuzzy logic!”

With Kovair’s newly announced VSMP for DevSecOps solutions, Security as a Service offering, and ChatGPT integrations, along with it’s existing ALM/PLM/PPM solutions, a new solution can occur with Kovair’s Workflow Engine supporting a Decision Tree, with human oversight, real-time value-stream management dashboards, that are policy-based, secure, with AI/ML integrations that support newer CAIO: Chief AI Officer roles, newer workflows that are part automated and part collaborative, with proper sign-off and oversight by appropriate IT Leaders.”