Generative AI has become a buzzword in the business community, resulting in 65 percent of executives in a recent KPMG survey saying they believe the technology will have a high or extremely high impact on their organization in the next three to five years. Yet most say they are unprepared for immediate adoption, with 60 percent estimating they are 12 to 24 months from implementing their first generative AI solution. Fewer than half of respondents say they have the right technology, talent, and governance in place to successfully implement generative AI.

Respondents anticipate spending the next 6-12 months increasing their understanding of how generative AI works, evaluating what value it offers and and investing in generative AI tools.

“Generative AI is moving so fast, it has executives’ heads spinning. Companies can’t keep up with dozens of new generative AI offshoots coming out each month,” KPMG U.S. technology consulting leader Todd Lohr told VentureBeat. “While they’ve bought into its overall promise, they struggle with taking the first step.”

Regulatory and ethical questions swirling around generative AI are other reasons enterprise is slow to take the plunge. The study was fielded in March 2023, when KPMG canvassed 300 C-suite and senior executives, 225 of them in the U.S. All ran businesses with annual revenue of $1 billion or more.

The survey found “generative AI has the potential to be the most disruptive technology seen to date, according to 77 percent of the executives surveyed,” notes VentureBeat, which identified “enterprise-wide areas, such as driving innovation, customer success, tech investment, and sales and marketing” as the areas that will be most impacted.

While enthusiasm varies by sector, executives in the technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) sector are forward-looking, with 60 percent of TMT respondents saying that “researching generative AI applications is a high or extremely high priority in the next 3-6 months, the highest of all industries,” KPMG says.

Respondents from TMT and financial services are the most likely to say that the recent focus on tools such as ChatGPT “have had a large impact on their digital and innovation strategies,” the researcher says.

Meanwhile, CNBC reports that what is thought to be “the first major real-world application of generative AI in the workplace” shows that “artificial intelligence tools like chatbots helped boost worker productivity at one tech company by 14 percent.”

The new research from Stanford and MIT measured productivity among some 5,000 customer support agents, primarily located in the Philippines at a Fortune 500 enterprise software firm over the course of a year.

Related National Bureau of Economic Research Study:
Generative AI Can Make Some Workers a Lot More Productive, ZDNet, 4/24/23
Yes, AI Increases Productivity, Study Suggests, Forbes, 4/25/23