Understanding the Hurdles – Why Companies Aren’t Ready for Full AI Integration in Business

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AI (artificial intelligence) is the topic that has got the attention of not only tech enthusiasts but also the general public since last year.

Is AI going to steal my job? Can it fully automate what I’m doing for a living? These and other questions make some people write columns – like yours truly – and make others actually worry about the future.

Yes, it’s probably a tale as old as time – the technological shift affecting the lives of workers. But let me remind you that AI isn’t all that new.

It was on the market for decades, assisting industries such as mass manufacturing, healthcare, finance, logistics, agriculture and many more. Today, AI is everywhere.

PwC suggests that by 2030, AI can contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy, resulting in up to a 26% boost to local economies’ GDP (gross domestic product).

And earlier this year, we saw over 50 prominent tech companies and institutions joining the AI alliance, including NASA, IBM and Meta, to ‘support open innovation and open science in AI.’

But what’s really behind this AI hype? Are companies ready to hop on the AI mass adoption trend?

Let’s take a closer look at the reasons for the popularity of AI, challenges for companies and trends we can expect in 2024.

Real face of AI adoption by businesses in 2023

In late 2022, ChatGPT did what no other tech company had done before. It reached one million users in a record five days after the launch and then got 100 million monthly active users in just two months.

To compare, it took TikTok nine months and two and a half years for Instagram to reach a 100 million users milestone.

Overall, the VC winter may have negatively affected the tech industry, but AI’s share of US startup funding, for instance, only doubled in 2023.

You could say that AI is a real FOMO (fear of missing out) for all VCs right now, as institutions want to get on board and not miss out on the latest opportunity.

Google, Apple and Amazon began to actively develop their AI solutions immediately after the launch of ChatGPT to succeed their competitors in the ‘race to dominate the [AI] space.’

But in reality, the trend isn’t translating into real-world action, and we experience the opposite – despite all the hype surrounding AI technologies, only 4.4% of American companies use AI for business purposes.

What are the reasons behind this evident gap between the hype and tangible results? Let’s get into…