How adoption of AI is progressing

The results suggest that most organizations have already begun to adopt AI in their businesses. Forty-seven percent of respondents say their companies have embedded at least one AI capability in their business processes—compared with 20 percent of respondents in a 2017 study who said their companies were using AI in a core part of their business or at scale   —and another 30 percent say they are piloting AI. Still, there remains a lot more potential to use AI across the enterprise; as our previous research has shown, AI opportunities exist in every sector and business function. Just 21 percent of respondents say their organizations have embedded AI in several parts of the business, and so far, investments in AI are a relatively small fraction of companies’ overall spending on digital technologies. A majority of respondents (58 percent) say less than one-tenth of their companies’ digital budgets goes toward AI—though respondents overwhelmingly expect AI investments will increase in the coming years (71 percent say so).

Which AI capabilities have been deployed

Of the nine capabilities we asked about, robotic process automation, computer vision, and machine learning are most commonly deployed. For each of these, at least 20 percent of respondents say their companies have already embedded these technologies into their business processes. Physical robotics and autonomous vehicles are the least commonly deployed, largely because they are relevant only to companies in industries where there’s a clear application; in those sectors, respondents report the outsize use of the capabilities. For example, half of respondents in automotive and assembly (compared with 16 percent of the total average) say physical robotics are embedded in at least one function or business unit.