Dive Brief:
- Top leaders in the IT organization outpace their lower ranking peers when it comes to adoption of AI, according to a report published Tuesday by software company Freshworks. The company polled 2,000 IT professionals globally.
- More than 9 in 10 IT directors and other upper management respondents said they currently use AI to support their work, compared to just two-thirds of team leaders or managers, and about one-third of individual contributors.
- Nearly half of IT pros agree using AI cuts repetitive tasks from their workloads. Respondents estimate the technology will save more than five hours of work per week.
Dive Insight:
With software providers plugging in AI capabilities across their solutions, the time is ripe for experimentation. One key question executives are trying to answer is where the technology fits within the broader IT tool set.
For Principal Financial Group, the underlying technology stack helped determine which use cases were viable for deployment. After that, IT and external employees helped identify the best targets.
“We have a group of about 70 people across the company who have expressed interest and passion for generative AI. It started kind of as a study group,” said EVP and CIO Kathy Kay, speaking during a CIO Dive Live virtual event Sept. 13. “Now we have this huge cross-functional team that’s created all kinds of ideas and we’ve been working together to test a lot of them out.”
Interest in the technology is tempered by concerns about potential risks.
Two-thirds of executives ranked the mass availability of generative AI among their top-five most pressing emerging risks, according to a Gartner report published in August. Intellectual property, data privacy and cybersecurity are among the top risk factors associated with the development of generative AI, the report said
Generative AI’s rising risk profile reflects "both the rapid growth of public awareness and usage of generative AI tools, as well as the breadth of potential use cases, and therefore potential risks, that these tools engender,” Ran Xu, director, research in Gartner's Risk & Audit Practice, said.
