Everyone thinks AI will transform their business - but only 13% are making it happen

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• Most businesses expect AI will cause profound internal changes.
• Few of them, however, know how to get from A to B.
• Businesses continue to struggle with implementing AI. 

The growing use of AI in the workplace has been revealing one paradox after another. Use of the technology among individual workers is higher than ever, yet most businesses aren't reporting organization-wide gains; AI use in the customer service sector grows, but customers show they prefer speaking with humans; and businesses are racing to embed AI in their day-to-day operations, despite the fact that many of them don't trust the technology.

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A new report from IT infrastructure services provider Kyndryl has revealed even more paradoxes.

A multifaceted 'readiness gap'

Kyndryl surveyed 3,700 senior business executives across 21 countries for its latest "Readiness Report," published Monday. Echoing recent predictions from some prominent business leaders, 87% of those executives said that AI will "completely transform roles and responsibilities" within their organizations over the next twelve months, and yet comparatively few (29%) said their workforces are equipped with the skills and training necessary to leverage the technology.

The Kyndryl report also revealed a striking disconnect between organizations' level of confidence in their ability to adapt to new tech trends, and their track record in actually doing so. 

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According to the report, 90% of respondents felt confident that "their organization's tools and processes allow them to rapidly test and scale new ideas," yet more than half (57%) said "their innovation efforts are often delayed by foundational issues in the technology stack."

To put it simply: While there's an urgent clamor among senior business executives -- not only in tech, but also across industries like banking, energy, and healthcare -- to automate internal processes using AI tools, not many among them have a clear understanding of how they ought to go about making that happen, given their organizations' current structures.

"A readiness gap exists as enterprises grapple with the promise of transformative value from AI," Martin Schroeter, Kyndryl's Chairman and CEO, said in a statement. "Closing that gap is the challenge and opportunity ahead."

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In yet another twist, 54% of respondents reported measurable ROI from their AI efforts -- welcome news to executives in the wake of multiple studies failing to show tangible returns for virtually any businesses -- but even more (62%) said those efforts are still in their pilot stages. 

Pacesetters (again)

In language that mirrors a study conducted by Cisco published last week, Kyndryl identifies a small group (13% of survey respondents) of "pacesetters" who have been able to "pair strong vision with the investment and adaptability to act on it." 

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This is the small contingency of business leaders that, according to Kyndryl, has managed to not fall into the "readiness gap." They're setting ambitious goals for their organizations' adoption of AI while simultaneously taking concrete action to prepare their teams and tech infrastructure to be able to achieve those goals. 

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For example, pacesetters reported, on average, that approximately 66% of their employees were currently using AI on a weekly basis, compared to 63% of "followers" and 56% of "laggards" (the other two groups identified in the Kyndryl report).

Cisco also identified "pacesetters" as representing between 13% and 14% of the more than 8,000 business leaders that were surveyed for its study. In an email statement to ZDNET, Kyndryl said this overlap in findings between the two reports is "purely coincidental."