Juniper Networks finds enterprise artificial intelligence adoption yielding benefits

Juniper Networks, announced findings of a global research project that shows an increase in enterprise artificial intelligence adoption over the last 12 months is yielding tangible benefits to organizations. However, a shortage of human talent still exists and governance policies continue to lack in maturity – both of which are needed to responsibly manage AI’s growth when considering privacy issues, regulation compliance, hacking and AI terrorism.

Juniper partnered with Wakefield Research to conduct a survey of 700 senior IT leaders around the world with direct involvement in their organization’s AI and or machine learning plans or deployments. The survey gauges sentiment around the value of AI, the perceived maturity of deployments and where challenges still exist.

This year’s survey found that enterprises have largely moved past proof-of-concepts and limited trials of AI and are now implementing AI across their organizations, thanks to pandemic-related digital acceleration and the maturation of AI tools available. While Juniper’s 2021 report previously showed only 6% of C-level leaders had adopted AI-powered solutions across their organizations (citing technological, skillset and governance challenges), this year, 63% of company leaders surveyed say they are at least “most of the way” to their planned AI adoption goals.

Still, only 9% of IT leaders consider their AI governance and policies, such as establishing a company-wide AI leader or responsible AI standards and processes, to be “fully mature.” At the same time, more leaders see governance as a priority: 95% agree having proper AI governance in place is important to stay ahead of future legislation, up from 87% in 2021. Despite leadership recognizing the importance of AI governance and having policies in place to manage, govern and maintain, almost half of respondents (48%) think more needs to be done to effectively govern AI.

The research also found:

• Despite growing dependence on AI, IT leaders do not see AI replacing humans, but rather allowing employees to save time and focus on more strategic and nuanced tasks. Around half of IT leaders say AI will allow employees to focus on being more innovative (55%), gain new skills (50%) and increase their engagement (47%).
• Almost all AI/ML leaders (95%) agree cybersecurity is a critical component to maintaining and securing an enterprise AI solution. Cybersecurity substantially increased in importance as the most critical area for AI adoption: 29% said cybersecurity was the most critical to AI adoption in 2022, versus 14% in 2021.
• Almost all IT leaders (96%) say that in the next 12 months, AI will assist in reducing risk and increasing quality within their organization, with Networking/Cloud (25%), IT Infrastructure (21%) and Supply Chain (15%) as the business functions thought to have the greatest potential to derive benefits from implementing AI.
• Hiring the right people to operate and develop capabilities is a top area for investment for optimizing AI. IT leaders rank three areas as the top investment options (21% each): hiring the right people to operate and develop AI capabilities; further training the AI models; and expanding the capabilities of the current AI tool into new business units. Last year, 26% of respondents ranked hiring people to develop AI capabilities within an organization as their top investment priority for optimizing AI capabilities in their organizations, compared to the 11% who said their top priority was to train end-users to interact effectively with the tools themselves.