Senior AI professionals see positive returns on active GenAI investments

Dataiku has released survey findings that explore how GenAI has reshaped operations as it becomes a cornerstone of enterprises' business strategy. The findings underscore a wave of growing optimism, as 65% of respondents verified that they are experiencing positive returns on the GenAI projects they have put into production, demonstrating that these initiatives are not only guided by strategic foresight but are also financially rewarding. Nearly all leaders surveyed (90%) are investing in GenAI, highlighting a decisive shift, as 57% of respondents include GenAI as part of their IT and data science budgets, while 33% are creating new budget lines specifically for GenAI projects.

In May 2024, Dataiku and Databricks surveyed 400 global senior AI professionals to uncover year-over-year trends in GenAI utilization, perceptions, investment strategies, and operational challenges since its 2023 report:

Extreme worries over AI dropped sharply from 10% to 4%, suggesting an industry shift to a more moderate perspective.

Over half (56%) of AI leaders believe the C-suite better understands the risks and benefits of AI, a 17% year-over-year increase, which closely correlates to increased budget allocations.

Despite growing enthusiasm and strategic investments in GenAI, foundational obstacles to extracting the most value from analytics and AI continue to persist, with data quality leading at 58%.

Foundational obstacles have been compounded with emerging Gen-AI-specific barriers. The biggest and most present GenAI challenges for respondents include a lack of necessary resources (44%), employee knowledge deficiencies (28%), and IT and policy constraints (22%).

“As an industry, we’ve long talked about the last mile of AI and how to deliver value from the products that will drive the space forward. More than a third of companies now have a dedicated budget for GenAI, and it’s become evident how quickly they are embracing the technology and realizing strong returns on their investments,” said Conor Jensen, Global Field CDO of Dataiku. “Our survey reveals that AI leaders are starting to think broadly about where they apply analytics and AI across the organization not only to improve but accelerate business outcomes.”

“These findings reaffirm that interest in GenAI continues to grow stronger. Yet, organizations face challenges in delivering high-quality GenAI apps,” said Prem Prakash, Head of AI Marketing at Databricks. “To solve these challenges, we want to help every business unlock the power of data intelligence by helping them build domain-specific, secure AI systems leveraging their data. Together with Dataiku, we will continue to help every enterprise benefit from GenAI and deliver positive outcomes for their business.”

LLM Variety Sustains Competitive Edge

The survey also looked closely at AI leaders' approaches to GenAI model adoption and found a multi-large language model strategy pushes the boundaries of innovation and provides the biggest competitive advantage:

Hosted LLM services are the most popular for ease of integration and broad acceptance, with 85% of respondents either using these services in production or exploring their potential.

Self-hosted open-source LLMs, which provide flexibility and can address security and privacy concerns, are gaining popularity. More than half of the participants (56%) said they are experimenting with or have put these models into production.

AI leaders are committed to trialing other GenAI models like multimodal, video, image, and more. Over half (65%) reported experimenting with or using these LLMs in production to gain a competitive edge.