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AI Buzz Sparks IT Infrastructure Shifts, but Privacy and Strategic Challenges Are Impacting Adoption

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Utilizing AI Is the Top IT Organization Priority for the Next 2 Years

The industry enthusiasm surrounding AI has quickly led to shifts in organizations’ strategic priorities and expected investments such as demand for servers. Despite the hype, few organizations have operationalized GenAI to date. Instead, most are focused on overcoming initial barriers to adoption, including understanding the business implications of this new technology frontier.

 

The buzz around AI has permeated the minds of IT leaders at many organizations, with 44% of respondents* indicating that utilizing AI is a top priority for the next two years, outpacing all other priorities surveyed.

GenAI Has Generated Significant Interest Among IT Buyers of All Verticals and Company Sizes, But Few Have Implemented the Technology to Date

Generative AI (GenAI) is a hot topic, but only 22% of respondents* indicated their organization is using GenAI-based technology in day-to-day operations, suggesting that many organizations want to leverage GenAI to drive transformation but are unsure of where to begin. Most respondents are in a conceptual phase, with 57%* currently discussing GenAI use cases or testing GenAI technologies.

 

Not all organizations wish to build their own bespoke GenAI solutions, with 18% of respondents indicating they are waiting for turnkey solutions that can be applied to their business. Only 3% of respondents* are not considering GenAI at all.

 

There were no major differences in current levels of GenAI adoption relative to organization size.

 

Respondents from the industrials and technology verticals are slightly ahead of others in terms of using GenAI in day-to-day operations. Public sector lags considerably, with only 9% of respondents using GenAI today.

 

Healthcare respondents were most likely to be in the testing phase, at 47%.*
 

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Most Respondents Expect to Use GenAI Solutions Tailored to Their Use Case, While a Smaller Subset Will Adopt Software With Embedded GenAI Features

Overall, 65% of respondents* using or considering GenAI will run GenAI on their own infrastructure, and 45%* will use public cloud, signaling that GenAI projects will take on a hybrid strategy. It is worth noting that the respondents answering this survey are decision makers for purchasing IT infrastructure, and therefore may be more biased toward using their organization’s private infrastructure for GenAI versus individuals who are focused on public cloud.

 

For some organizations, using GenAI will be based solely on enhancements to ISV applications and not their own custom build-outs. Of the respondents using or considering GenAI, 13%* expect to only use software and applications with GenAI features and do not plan to build GenAI use cases in public cloud or on their own infrastructure.

 

Enterprises appear to be most wary of using public cloud for GenAI technologies.

Vendors Engaging Customers on GenAI Will Need to Start the Journey by Establishing Trust in Handling Data and Navigating Legal and Ethical Concerns

The greatest barriers to organizations adopting GenAI are those at the heart of the GenAI debate: ensuring data privacy and assessing the legal and ethical risks of using GenAI technology. IT decision makers are expected to ensure their organizations are operating according to standards; however, they are inexperienced with the technologies to be adopted and vendors have limited use cases to showcase at this time to assuage these concerns.

 

More tactical challenges, such as long lead times to purchase AI-enabled servers or structuring data for machine learning, are farther down the list but may become greater barriers over time when organizations move from conceptualization to implementation of GenAI solutions.

 

Enterprises are by far the most concerned with ensuring data privacy, as 56% of enterprise respondents* consider it a top barrier compared to 31% of respondents overall.

 

Obtaining budget is of greater concern to small and midsize businesses than to enterprises.

Financial services respondents were most likely to be concerned with more tactical issues, such as addressing hardware shortages, structuring data and finding vendors to help deploy GenAI solutions.

 

Access all of TBR’s customer research data on GenAI adoption in IT infrastructure with a subscription to TBR Insight Center™. Start your free trial today!

 

*Survey data and analysis in this section are excerpts from TBR’s 2Q24 Infrastructure Strategy Customer Research. The survey was fielded in April and May of 2024 and focuses on the overall investment strategies of IT infrastructure purchasers. Survey respondents are IT decision makers based in the U.S. who are responsible for servers and storage purchase decisions at companies with 250 or more employees. Small business was defined as organizations with 250 to 999 employees, medium business as organizations with 1,000 to 4,999 employees, and enterprise as organizations with 5,000 or more employees.