AI Adoption in the Enterprise 2020

Last year, when we felt interest in artificial intelligence (AI) was approaching a fever pitch, we created a survey to ask about AI adoption. When we analyzed the results, we determined the AI space was in a state of rapid change, so we eagerly commissioned a follow-up survey to help find out where AI stands right now. The new survey, which ran for a few weeks in December 2019, generated an enthusiastic 1,388 responses. The update sheds light on what AI adoption looks like in the enterprise—hint: deployments are shifting from prototype to production—the popularity of specific techniques and tools, the challenges experienced by adopters, and so on. There’s a lot to bite into here, so let’s get started. Key survey results:

• The majority (85%) of respondent organizations are evaluating AI or using it in production.¹ Just 15% are not doing anything at all with AI.
• More than half of respondent organizations identify as “mature” adopters of AI technologies: that is, they’re using AI for analysis or in production.
• Supervised learning is the most popular ML technique among mature AI adopters, while deep learning is the most popular technique among organizations that are still evaluating AI.
• Though a problem, the lack of ML and AI skills isn’t the biggest impediment to AI adoption. Almost 22% of respondents identified a lack of institutional support as the most significant issue.
• Few organizations are using formal governance controls to support their ...