No safety in being part of a herd moving slowly on AI

AI maturity among enterprises is still very low—but more evenly distributed across industries than the sheer volume of projects and programs among specific industries may suggest, according to the HFS Research Pulse Survey H1 2024. Even so, leaders must not take comfort from being among the slow-moving average cohort—they must act to race ahead of their peers.

We asked participant enterprise leaders to rate their level of engagement with AI (1. Investigating; 2. Piloting; 3. Implementing; 4. Steady-state production) across computer vision, conversational AI, machine learning, AIOps, and generative AI.

From their responses (sample size = 409), we calculated two scores:

1. AI Impact (maturity x volume of activity)
2. Weighted Average Maturity (the average maturity of AI activity within a particular industry, represented as a percentage score)

• • TMT leads the AI Impact score among our participants, though platform-based businesses lead the weighted average. Energy and utilities, and retail and CPG, round out that top three.
  • The weighted average reveals a more level-playing field across all industries, enabling us to see beyond the potential skew of greater volumes of activity.
  • However, the weighted average also reveals a relatively low level of maturity across the board. Scores below 50% indicate that most enterprises are very much in the early stages of investigating and piloting in their journey toward maturity. Risk aversion and inflexible budget processes are likely behind the slow take-up to date.

The Bottom Line: Enterprise leaders must push through their AI challenges—or remain lagging in the cohort of slow-moving average firms

Don’t take comfort from this data if you’re still among those yet to push past pilots with your use of AI. Being part of a cohort of slow-moving average firms won’t make it any easier to survive the market shock that those enterprises that are pushing on with AI will create as they access new ways of working, surging forward on productivity gains and new value creation. Security, legal, ethical, and privacy challenges are all surmountable. Work with your partners to find a way forward and join those shaking your market.