ITWeb, in partnership with First Distribution and IBM, ran a survey on AI-driven automation to assess just how ready South African businesses are to adopt the technology.
The survey aimed to uncover how organisations are currently leveraging AI-driven automation, where they are seeing the greatest value, and what barriers may be slowing progress.
A total of 51 responses were captured, with 78% of respondents being at management level, and working in a range of major industry sectors. Some 51% of respondents came from the IT sector, 12% from the public sector and 10% came from the financial services sector.
Here are some of the key findings:
- Asked to describe their organisation’s current use of AI technologies (e.g. IBM Watson), 37% of survey respondents use it for exploring AI, 29% for piloting AI projects, and22% for scaling AI across the business.
- The top three primary goals for adopting AI were to improve operational efficiency (86%), enable better decision making (69%) and enhance customer experience (63%). Reducing costs came in fourth with 55%.
- When it came to their organisation’s data maturity, 33% of respondents said that some integration exists, 31% said it was mostly unified and accessible, 18% said data is siloed and fragmented, and 18% reported a fully integrated, real-time data environment.
- 63% of survey respondents are moderately confident in the quality and reliability of their data for decision-making. 22% are slightly confident and 10% are very confident.
- The biggest challenge reported when working with data is data governance and compliance (37%), followed by data integration across systems (27%) and scaling data infrastructure (16%). Real-time analytics was a challenge amongst 16% of respondents.
- Half of respondent organisations (52%) say their business applications and systems are partially integrated, 27% say well integrated and 14% report full integration with automation.
- 69% of respondents are using API integration technologies, 20% report middleware platforms and 8% manual processes.
- Asked to indicate the extent to which they have automated their business workflows, 43% of respondents reported moderate automation (multiple processes), 37% reported limited automation (specific tasks), 12% noted no automation and 8% reported extensive automation (end-to-end orchestration).
- The biggest barriers to AI adoption in respondent organisations were ranked as follows:• Skills shortage (39%)• Security/compliance concerns (39%)• Budget constraints (37%)• Data quality issues (33%)• Integration challenges (24%)
- The main three challenges faced by developers are speed of delivery (43%), maintaining legacy code (35%) and skills shortages (29%).