Generative AI isn’t a home run in the enterprise

Generative AI gets a lot of press, from image generating tools like Midjourney to Runway to OpenAI’s ChatGPT . But businesses aren’t convinced of the tech’s potential to positively affect their bottom lines; at least that’s what surveys (and my colleague Ron Miller’s reporting ) suggest. In a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) poll this month of over 1,400 C suite executives, 66% said that they were ambivalent about — or outright dissatisfied with — their organization’s progress on GenAI so far, citing a shortage of talent and skills, unclear roadmaps and an absence of strategy around deploying GenAI responsibly.

To be clear, the execs — who hail from such industries as manufacturing, transportation and industrial goods — still see GenAI as a priority. Eighty nine percent responding to the BCG poll ranked the tech as a “top three” IT initiative for their companies in 2024. But only about half of the poll’s 1,400 respondents expect GenAI to bring substantial productivity gains (i.e., in the area of 10% or more) to the workforces that they oversee.

The results, taken in tandem with responses to a BCG survey late last year , put into sharp relief the high degree of enterprise skepticism surrounding AI powered generative tools of any kind. In the survey last year, which canvassed a group of 2,000 exec decision makers, more than 50% said that they were “discouraging” GenAI adoption over worries it would encourage bad or illegal decision making and compromise their employer’s data security.

“Bad or illegal decision making” touches on copyright violations — a hot button topic in GenAI..