Beyond the hype: GenAI is delivering, new 乐鱼（Leyu）体育官网 survey shows
A large majority聽say their companies are already seeing ROI as they move to fast-track investments and rapidly scale adoption.
Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
Talk about arriving with a bang. Amid much hype, generative AI (GenAI) is already making a massive impact on the business world, creating both real value today and bullish confidence in its game-changing potential going forward, according to a new 乐鱼（Leyu）体育官网 survey.
This momentum reflects a rare blend of unbridled optimism and tangible outcomes. Far more than just the latest buzzword, GenAI has quickly emerged as a buzz-saw of innovation that is dramatically reshaping business strategy and planning, our survey results show. It鈥檚 flipping the script on 鈥渒iller apps鈥� and technology fads that, more often than not, overpromise and underdeliver.
And business leaders are leaning in. They鈥檙e expanding their GenAI investments and seeing returns in real-time, according to our findings鈥攁nd that rapid ROI is driving plans to scale the technology faster still. They鈥檙e using GenAI in their decision-making, integrating the technology into more functions, and boosting workforce readiness through substantial investments in training and hiring.
Here鈥檚 a closer look at some of the eye-opening new insights from our GenAI 2024 Survey.
Here today, bigger tomorrow
If the best way to predict the future is to create it, then GenAI is already helping many companies do both: creating immediate improvements while pointing the way to significant new opportunities down the line.
Let鈥檚 start with some of the topline 鈥渢oday鈥� results from our survey, which captured feedback from 225 C-suite and business leaders at companies with $1 billion-plus in revenue. Of note:
70%
Say they are now leveraging data from GenAI in company decision-making, and 47 percent say the technology is shaping their competitive positioning.
52%
Report new revenue opportunities from GenAI.
78%
Say their teams are at least moderately equipped to leverage GenAI鈥攁 significant improvement from last year鈥檚 survey.
Looking ahead, executives are moving with speed and confidence. For example:
83%
Respondents who plan to increase investments in GenAI over the next three years, and almost as many (78 percent) are confident in the ROI of those investments on that same timeframe.
60%
As far as allocating that investment, 6 in 10 aim to scale up current GenAI initiatives, and 55 percent plan to expand the technology to additional business functions.
Early adopters
As our new report also shows, GenAI is being adopted across a broad range of industries鈥攂oth expected and unexpected. In fact, the top overall use case in our survey was inventory management in the industrial markets, where two-thirds of respondents in that sector say they are generating value. That was followed by document assessment in healthcare and life sciences (57 percent) and workflow automation in the technology and media sector (43 percent).
A common throughline across all three of those top use cases is operational and workflow efficiency, so it鈥檚 no surprise that increasing productivity was the top overall goal for GenAI in our survey. (Although it鈥檚 worth noting that within the subset of C-suite respondents, revenue growth was the No. 1 goal.)
Regardless of industry, the top business functions for GenAI adoption are:
1
2
3
The GenAI-enabled organization
One of the biggest year-over-year changes in our 2024 survey was a significant new commitment to helping the workforce prepare for and leverage GenAI鈥檚 capabilities. Indeed, 69 percent of respondents say their companies are actively training their workforces on new GenAI tools, and 61 percent are hiring new AI talent. Those numbers were just 12 and 24 percent, respectively, in 2023.
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Despite this progress, gaps in capabilities persist, posing some challenges to scaling GenAI more rapidly. Case in point: Just 12 percent of the companies in our survey feel confident that they can build out their GenAI technologies in-house, while half plan on buying or leasing from partners, and another 29 percent expect a mix of build and buy.
Other potential speed bumps include privacy, regulatory, and security challenges, which rated as the top three GenAI risks in our 2024 report. But here again, perspectives are getting more optimistic as companies have had another year to assess the obstacles and shore up critical areas such as cybersecurity, data quality, and overall AI governance.聽
For much more on the top ways that companies are managing GenAI鈥檚 risks, streamlining regulatory concerns, preparing their workforces, and rapidly scaling their GenAI opportunities, download the full GenAI 2024 Survey now and explore more of our related insights below.聽
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