The FINANCIAL — Gartner Survey Reveals 66% of Organizations Increased or Did Not Change AI Investments Since the Onset of COVID-19. A Gartner, Inc. poll of roughly 200 business and IT professionals on September 24, 2020 revealed that 24% of respondents’ organizations increased their artificial intelligence (AI) investments and 42% kept them unchanged since the onset of COVID-19. Growth – namely customer experience and retention, and revenue growth – along with cost optimization were the top focus areas for their current AI initiatives.
Over the course of the next six-nine months, 75% of respondents will continue or start new AI initiatives as they move into the Renew phase of their organization’s post-pandemic Reset.
“Enterprise investment in AI has continued unabated despite the crisis,” said Frances Karamouzis, distinguished research vice president at Gartner. “However, the most significant struggle of moving AI initiatives into production is the inability for organizations to connect those investments back to business value.”
Seventy-nine percent of respondents said their organizations were exploring or piloting AI projects, while only 21% stated their AI initiatives were in production.
Lack of AI Talent is a Myth
The minimal strides made across organizations in operationalizing AI cannot necessarily be attributed to lack of AI talent. A Gartner survey of 607 IT leaders in November and December 2019 found that only 7% of respondents said that limited AI skills are a barrier to AI implementation. Instead, security and privacy concerns, along with the complexity of integrating AI within existing infrastructure, are at the top of the list.
“AI talent is not one thing, it’s multiple things,” said Erick Brethenoux, research vice president at Gartner. “The biggest misconception in the journey to successfully scaling AI is the search for ‘unicorns,’ or the perfect combination of AI, business and IT skills all present in a single resource. Since this is impossible to fulfill, focus instead on bringing together a balanced combination of such skills to ensure results.”
Organizations with the lowest AI maturity level are not experiencing a shortage of AI skills, with 56% reporting they either have enough talent or can easily hire or train AI talent. As organizations increase in AI maturity, so too does the level of reported AI talent, with 89% having no issues acquiring AI skills at the highest maturity level.
Global robotic process automation (RPA) software revenue is projected to reach $1.89 billion in 2021, an increase of 19.5% from 2020, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc. Despite economic pressures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the RPA market is still expected to grow at double-digit rates through 2024.
Worldwide RPA software revenue is expected to reach $1.58 billion in 2020, an increase of 11.9% from 2019 (see Table 1). Through 2020, average RPA prices are expected to decrease 10% to 15%, with annual 5% to 10% decreases expected in 2021 and 2022, creating strong downward pricing pressure.
The pandemic and ensuing recession increased interest in RPA for many enterprises. Gartner predicts that 90% of large organizations globally will have adopted RPA in some form by 2022 as they look to digitally empower critical business processes through resilience and scalability, while recalibrating human labor and manual effort.
Through 2024, large organizations will triple the capacity of their existing RPA portfolios. The majority of “new” spend will come from large organizations that are purchasing new add-on capacity from their original vendor or partners within the ecosystem.
“As organizations grow, they will need to add licenses to run RPA software on additional servers and add additional cores to handle the load,” said Mr. Biscotti. “This trend is a natural reflection of the increasing demands being placed on an organization’s ‘everywhere’ infrastructure.”
Future RPA Clients Will Come from Non-IT Buyers
Adoption of RPA will increase as awareness of RPA grows among business users. In fact, by 2024, Gartner predicts nearly half of all new RPA clients will come from business buyers who are outside the IT organization.
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