The U.S. and its global partners have sunk trillions of dollars into the AI arms race, with Silicon Valley’s prime movers swearing that the technology is destined to transform our world for the better. Now, a new study joins a growing chorus that seek to highlight an inconvenient truth: so far, a vast majority of companies that adopt AI are making no money from it at all.
The new study comes from KPMG, a British accounting and professional services firm. The study, published Wednesday, looked at businesses in Canada, surveying them for evidence that AI was providing anything in the way of a ROI. Sadly, the study found that, no, pretty much nobody who is using AI has managed to find its financial upside yet. Indeed, the survey found that, while more and more businesses are using AI, only about 2 percent of respondents claimed that they had seen a “return on their generative AI investments.”
The survey, which involved 753 business leaders from across the nation, found that the slim amount of respondents who did report positive results from AI were from very large companies that reported at least $1 billion in annual revenue. A lot of companies have yet to fully integrate AI into their workflows, and many of them are still merely experimenting with the technology, the report adds.
AI is seeing the largest rates of adoption in IT and sales and marketing, the study shows. Other areas where it has seen broad adoption include research and development, finance and accounting, and engineering, it says.
Canadian Managing Partner of Digital and Transformation at KPMG Canada Stephanie Terrill laid it out the general outlook like this:
“Only a small sliver of Canadian businesses are generating growth from their AI investments today, and that’s understandable – new technologies take time to be adopted and demonstrate identifiable return on investment,” Terrill said. “However, Canada is facing near-term threats to its economic competitiveness and grappling with declining productivity and prosperity, so waiting years for AI investments to create value isn’t realistic in this environment – in fact, it’s downright risky.”
Despite that fairly negative outlook, Terrill’s takeaway isn’t what you might think—that AI just isn’t very helpful and that companies should ditch it. Instead, she says that Canadian companies should turbocharge their AI investments so as to increase national “competitiveness” and see that elusive ROI that is currently eluding them:
Canadian organizations need to accelerate AI implementation into core operations to start achieving near- to medium-term productivity gains if we hope to become more economically competitive as a country,” she added.
How long do companies have to wait until AI starts doing what it’s supposed to do? Many business leaders expect to wait a number of years before AI has its intended effect, the study reports. Despite the fact that it’s currently useless, a certain portion of companies (3 in 10) expect to start seeing a return on their AI investment within a year, it adds. A greater portion (6 in 10) said they expect to see that ROI in one to five years. Hope springs eternal, I guess.
Read the full article here
