Dive Brief:
- Tech leaders reported higher return on their AI investments year over year, but their readiness to handle external risks has dropped, a Tuesday report from Kyndryl found. The service provider surveyed 3,700 senior business leaders across 21 countries.
- Transitioning from AI experimentatio to broader adoption is challenging for many enterprises, especially around workforce and talent needs, the report said. Less than one-third of tech leaders said they’ve formally updated roles to reflect the responsibilities around AI or implemented a change management system for AI adoption within their organizations.
- CIOs must work with other members of the C-suite to drive the outcomes they’re hoping for with AI, said Kyndryl CIO Kim Basile in a briefing with reporters Tuesday. “You have to bring people along in this journey in order for them to be able to make the kind of difference with this technology that they need to,” she said.
Dive Insight:
Tech leaders are feeling pressure to prove the ROI of their significant AI spending, but many said they feel ill-equipped to navigate changing business models, tech foundations and external threats such as cyberattacks.
Security topped the list of external risks tech leaders were concerned about, the report found, with hacking instances like OpenAI’s breach of open source platform Hugging Face and Anthropic’s Claude models escaping their test environment contributing to those concerns.
The technology’s evolution has allowed cybersecurity to mature quickly while introducing new challenges, Basile said.
“At the same time, there are threat actors that are also moving much faster, and that technology is driving them to increase the number of threats,” she said.
As technology environments become more interconnected and AI takes on a greater role in operations, tech leaders need stronger visibility into their systems, and a better understanding of their vulnerabilities.
Tech leaders shared concerns about how AI was changing industries outside their own, potentially eroding established boundaries and changing business models. Leaders also said they’re concerned about how digital sovereignty will play a role in the evolution of their tech stack, Kyndryl’s report said.
Despite these setbacks, AI adoption matured across enterprises this year, with less than half of tech leaders surveyed saying they’re still in the experimentation phase, according to Kyndryl’s report. Nearly half substantially changed their AI strategies this year across their technology, people and governance, and 21% said they canceled a major AI initiative after it failed.
But IT infrastructure remains a concern for enterprise leaders — 71% said they’re nearly or fully modernized, but two-thirds of CIOs said they thought their tech foundations needed significant work before being fully ready to scale AI.
The technology landscape for enterprises has dramatically changed, said Ismail Amla, SVP of Kyndryl Consult, during the briefing. Enterprises need to be secure, have transparency and auditability and their infrastructure needs to be updated. But the real issues for most enterprises are in non-technical work, he said.
“[The challenge] is around how work changes, and whether we have got the people who are going to work with these new systems incentivized in the right way, trained in the right way and understand what it means to work with agents,” Amla said. “We’ve always talked about people, process and technology. It’s still those things, but it’s much more complex with a huge human change overlayed on top of that.”
