Dive Brief:
- IT team project requests rose by 39% over the last year, according to Mulesoft. The Salesforce-owned integration software vendor surveyed 1,050 tech decision-makers for its annual connectivity benchmark report, published Tuesday.
- Skills gaps and compliance concerns are slowing progress, the survey found. Four in 5 respondents said siloed data impeded digital transformation and 3 in 5 respondents reported their data systems are not yet configured to fully leverage emerging AI capabilities.
- Organizations are asking more of IT to drive digital transformation, deploy generative AI tools and implement large language models, according to Param Kahlon, EVP and GM of automation and integration at Salesforce.
Dive Insight:
Data operations and insights are a consistent enterprise priority, but generative AI has placed a keener focus on feeding new sources of unstructured data into the growing pipeline.
As CIOs prioritize upgrades, IT teams are grappling with siloed data and ecosystems rife with complexity.
“Expecting organizations to have one unified data source for all of their customer, product and financial data sets is unrealistic,” Kahlon told CIO Dive. “It's just not going to happen.”
Enterprise aspirations have outgrown data stacks.
As vendors expand cloud-based AI marketplaces, IT leaders anticipate the number of LLMs they use to increase steadily over the next three years, growing by nearly 70%, Mulesoft found. Four in 5 respondents said their organization already uses multiple predictive and generative AI models.
Talent to support more robust data operations remains hard to source. Lack of tech skills was the top AI implementation concern for organizations, according to an MIT Technology Review report commissioned by Databricks.
Despite talent woes, Salesforce has seen a jump in what organizations expect from IT teams, Kahlon said.
“Companies are basically saying that transformation and technology are going to change the way [they] do business,” said Kahlon. “IT is seeing a lot of demands come in from the business to do more projects.”
