State of AI 2022: Adoption plateaus but leaders increase gap

According to McKinsey’s latest State of AI report, leaders are pulling ahead but overall adoption is plateauing.

McKinsey notes that organisations that report using AI in at least one business area have more than doubled since 2017.

The most significant jump in adoption was between 2017 (20%) and 2018 (47%). A peak was reached in 2019 (58%) but has since tailed off to 50% in 2022.

Considering the plateau includes the pandemic years – when businesses were largely expected to increase their adoption of automation technologies – the overall decline in AI adoption will come as a surprise to many.

Of the organisations that have adopted AI, most have literally doubled down. In 2018, the average number of AI capabilities that organisations have embedded was 1.9. In 2022, that’s increased to 3.8.

Businesses are subsequently allocating more of their budgets to AI.

In 2018, 40 percent reported more than five percent of their budgets went on AI. In 2022, that’s bumped up to 52 percent. 63 percent of respondents expect to further increase their investments over the next three years.

Robotic process automation (39%) leads as the area where most organisations are using AI. This is followed by computer vision (34%), natural-language text understanding (33%), virtual agents/chatbots (33%), and deep learning (30%) to round out the top five.

In terms of use cases, organisations are predominantly using AI to optimise service operations (24%). The creation of new AI-based products (20%), customer service analytics (19%), customer segmentation (19%), and AI enhancements of products (19%) round out the leading five use cases.

You can find a full copy of State of AI 2022 here.

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