Irish organisations are slow to adopt AI, new PwC survey finds
Anne Sheehan, general manager, Microsoft Ireland; Martin Duffy, head of GenAI, PwC Ireland; Enda McDonagh, managing partner, PwC Ireland, and Aisling Curtis, market leader, Strategic Alliances, PwC Ireland.
Just 7% of Irish organisations have adopted AI widely, according to PwC Ireland’s GenAI Business Leaders Survey.
Unveiled at the recent launch of the PwC GenAI Business Centre enabled by Microsoft, Ireland’s 7% compares poorly with the 26% of US business executives rolling out AI on a large scale in their organisations, polled in a previous PwC survey.
However, a further 61% of Irish business leaders said they are either considering adopting AI or are using it to a limited extent. A quarter of Irish respondents do not plan to use GenAI in the year ahead.
Aisling Curtis, market leader, Strategic Alliances, with PwC Ireland, said: “Our 2023 GenAI Business Leaders Survey highlights that, despite the opportunities, AI and GenAI adoption is slow in Irish business and there is more to do on improving AI governance.
“At the same time, Irish business leaders overall are positive about the potential impact of GenAI on the economy and their businesses. To secure the opportunities from AI and GenAI businesses need a clear strategy to ensure return on investment in a safe and secure way.
“Going forward there will need to be a better understanding of the AI and GenAI capabilities, better governance, more focus on measuring and achieving strong return on investment and trustworthy algorithms with the right data to train them.”
Some 24% of Irish business leaders admitted that they have no plans to use GenAI, such as OpenAI’s GPT models, in the year ahead.
Where they are planning to use GenAI there are a wide range of expected applications such as supporting financial, sales and marketing planning (21%), enhancing supply chains and operations (15%), developing new products (11%) and helping forecast market conditions (10%).
The EU AI Act is expected to be passed into law in the coming months and will drive the importance of good AI governance. However, just 6% of Irish business leaders confirmed that they have an AI governance structure in place. A further 72% have not even started to implement such a plan or are not sure.
“AI is a business wide initiative and there should be a leader who is responsible to set the strategy,” said Aisling Curtis. “However, the survey highlights that a large majority (70%) of Irish organisations have not yet started the implementation of putting a head of AI in place.”
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In all, 55% of Irish respondents are not confident in their organisation’s ability to assess the return on investment on current AI initiatives.
Where investments were made, 92% said that their organisation did not realise value from AI initiatives in the last 12 months or the value was small. Given GenAI will have a very significant impact on their businesses, measuring and realising the impact of these technologies will become very important.
