The tsunami wave of AI that everyone expected to flood the land has crashed into the bulwark of industry. A survey of 1,709 industry senior decision makers conducted by enterprise software provider IFS found the implementation of AI has been stalled by champions of existing technology displaceable by AI as well as current processes and skills gaps — including an inability to develop or apply AI. Yet, about half of these decision makers haven’t given up hope and remain optimistic that AI could be implemented in one to two years with a strategy in place.
The IFS survey found 48% of the respondents were “gathering proposals” and only 27% had achieved perceivable results. A fifth of respondents are still in the research phase.
Most everyone surveyed (82%) feels the pressure, though, as if someone is demanding them to do something, anything, with AI.
“AI is poised to become the most transformational enterprise tool ever seen, but the research reveals that there are still fundamental misunderstandings about harnessing its power within an industrial setting,” says Christian Pedersen, Chief Product Officer at IFS. “It is telling that AI is expected to reduce costs and raise margins significantly, but a lack of robust strategy means most businesses must be more skilled and prepared to reach these ambitions.
IFS addressed the service, maintenance, manufacturing, and distribution services with a cloud-based platform. Design, manufacturing, construction, and software firms as a group may be similarly pressed to implement AI without understanding the types of AI or a strategy of how to implement it. All have some pointy-haired boss that makes unreasonable demands of their Dilberts, leaving it to them to get AI in their technology stack.
Pressure also comes from below, with the public either enamored of AI or scared to death, expecting AI to miraculously design cars and houses or dreading losing their jobs to AI. Average folk are informed on AI by the media which is itself swept into a frenzy — feverishly reporting that the technology is so promising that it can beat chess masters, detect cancer, and pass Google’s software test … and must indeed be in widespread use.
However, quite the opposite is true. We should not be surprised. When has a new technology ever been immediately accepted everywhere all at once?
Think of the cloud preceding AI that like AI was also promoted with fanfare. Amazon introduced the cloud with the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in 2006. Eighteen years later, only 34% of businesses have moved to the cloud, according to the IFS survey.
What’s holding up AI?
Top management asking the impossible, ridiculous, and meaningless of middle management may be entertainment when it’s a Dilbert cartoon. However, when technology vendors offer what is clearly a business solution to C-suite executives and board members, only to have it run into defensive attitudes of conservative forces or simple inertia, it must be frustrating.
But to middle managers, making a sweeping change in infrastructure (whether to tools or processes) is like asking the engineer in the boiler room below deck to swap out the engine as the ship moves … and make it immediately ten times faster than the old one.
For IT staff accustomed to installing software and perhaps customizing it to fit their companies, altogether new, revolutionary technology, whether it be 3D CAD, cloud, or AI, must be daunting. Where does one even start when everything is so different? Consider the programming language, for example: What is Python? What is ML? Do we have data for it to train on?
Skills one learned in school or self-taught are no longer useful. Worse, engineers could be replaced by the technology they’re putting in place. ChatGTP was reported to have passed a coding interview for a Level 3 engineer position at Google.
What is IFS.ai?
IFS.ai is a neat, self-explanatory packaging of IFS’ AI architecture announced in November 2023. It is not a separate version of the company created to capitalize on the interest on AI though it does send a statement to the industry and their competitors that while others may be only kicking the tires, IFS is already full speed ahead. The companies IFS Ltd (in the U.K) and IFS Inc. (U.S.) still function as they did before. IFS.ai may be composed of IFS’ AI-specific R&D, separated from other developers, but it has no products of its own. IFS claims to have implemented some version of AI in most, if not all, of its cloud-based products, allowing it to state that its AI is being used by hundreds of millions of users.
It's good use of technology – and good marketing. Whether other companies will follow suit, coming out with AI-differentiated architecture and R&D groups, remains to be seen.