The pandemic has accelerated the pace of Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption, but executives say it is moving too fast. Furthermore, despite concerns about the speed of adoption, business leaders are confident that AI can help tackle some of today's toughest challenges, including Covid-19 tracking and vaccines. These are some of the findings of the “Thriving in an AI World” survey (Thriving in an AI World, in English), conducted by KPMG.
According to the content, a high number of business leaders from the following industries say that AI is at least moderately functional in their organizations: industrial production (93%), financial services (84%), technology (83%), retail (81% ), life sciences (77%), health (67%) and government (61%). Several sectors also recorded a significant increase compared to last year's report, such as financial services (37%), retail (29%) and technology (20%).
“Business leaders are observing that AI adoption has skyrocketed with the pandemic. However, as progress is being very rapid, there is a relevant debate going on about ethics, governance and regulatory issues. Many of these leaders fail to have a clear vision of what their organizations are doing to control and govern AI and fear that the risks are increasing,” says Frank Meylan, Lead Partner for Technology, Digital Transformation and Innovation at KPMG in Brazil and South America.
Half of business leaders in industrial manufacturing (55%), retail and technology (49% each) say AI is advancing faster than it should in their industry. Concerns about the speed of AI adoption are particularly pronounced among small businesses (63%), AI-savvy business leaders (51%), and Generation Z and Y business leaders (51%).
At the same time, the KPMG survey also highlighted that business leaders from small (88%) and large (80%) companies say that AI technology has helped their company during the Covid-19 outbreak. Life sciences and health executives are extremely confident in AI's ability to monitor the spread of Covid-19 cases (94% and 91%), help with vaccine development (90% and 94%) and distribution (90% and 88%), respectively.
“We are seeing very high levels of support across all industries for greater regulation of AI. As technology advances so rapidly, a more robust regulatory environment can help facilitate trade. It can also help to eliminate unintentional barriers, arising from other laws and regulations, resulting from the lack of maturity of legal and technical standards”, says Ricardo Santana, lead partner of Data & Analytics at KPMG in Brazil.
Findings from KPMG's “Thriving in an AI World” survey are based on feedback from 950 full-time business decision makers and/or information technology decision makers with at least moderate knowledge of enterprise AI with revenue in excess of US$ 1 billion across seven sectors: technology, financial services, industrial manufacturing, healthcare, life sciences, retail and government. Health and life sciences respondents are from companies with revenue greater than US$ 100 million.
The content is available in full at the link – https://advisory.kpmg.us/content/dam/advisory/en/pdfs/2021/thrivingai2021.pdf
