Leaders are devoting significant budget to generative AI for 2024
Canadian corporate leaders are making generative AI a top strategic priority, a new generative AI survey reveals. ITWC surveyed 100 corporate leaders across Canada to find out how they use and think about generative AI.
The results paint an enlightening picture of the current use of generative AI in organizations across Canada, the areas of the business that it’s impacting, potential future use cases, and the hurdles that leaders are looking to overcome as part of the adoption process.
Generative AI is a high priority for Canadian corporate leaders
More than 80% of the Canadian leaders polled said that they’re “very familiar with generative AI” and are “actively using it.” The same number indicated that the technology is “a high priority” for their organization’s leadership and 65% of respondents said they’ve dedicated “a significant amount” of budget to generative AI in 2024.
These findings indicate that generative AI, while still a fairly nascent technology, could be entering a new phase of adoption. Organizations may be moving past the initial ‘what is it and how do we use it’ stage and now be focused on how to operationalize and scale generative AI use cases.
Marketing, customer service & sales top the current use cases
The survey respondents indicated that, at the moment, their organizations are mostly using generative AI for content generation and customer service tasks. Similarly, when asked where they “see generative AI making the biggest impact the soonest,” the functional areas of customer service and marketing ranked highly.
The fact that content generation and marketing ranked so highly isn’t particularly surprising. Content generation tools and customer service chatbots have been some of the earliest and most popular applications of generative AI since it became widely available for public use in late 2022. In fact, Gartner Research predicts that, by 2025, 30% of all outbound marketing messages created by large organizations will be produced by generative AI. That’s up from less than 2% in 2022.
As generative AI technology and use cases mature, however, Canadian corporate leaders may want to start exploring beyond the quick productivity gains they’ve made with content generation and chatbots. Leaders should look to identify the “high-impact use cases” in key areas in their organization where generative AI could help streamline and optimize processes or tasks, such as supply chain, advertising, and call centre operations. Moving forward, they should be focusing on how to fully integrate generative AI across their entire organization for deeper operational change.
The rapid adoption of generative AI requires strategic preparation by corporate leaders, and they should be considering how to:
- Create a robust data foundation with comprehensive, integrated, and governed data
- Optimize infrastructure though cloud computing
- Collaborate across the organization to anticipate future challenges
- Identify critical business needs and metrics for success
- Nurture continuous experimentation and learning.
Generative AI has the potential to help businesses run more efficiently, like when generating content. But it also has equal potential to disrupt entire industries or create new products or revenue streams when applied strategically.
Leaders are actively investing in employee training
Nearly two-thirds of Canadian business leaders say they’re “actively investing” in generative AI skills development by providing both internal and external training for their employees. Despite that, corporate leaders still ranked employee training as the second top potential obstacle in their generative AI journey. The concern about employee training may be due to the ongoing shortage of AI skills and talent worldwide. However, just as generative AI continues to grow, so do the number of courses—both free and paid—available to these organizations and individuals.
Generative AI success does not happen overnight
Overall, the poll suggests Canadian corporate leaders are enthusiastic about the potential of generative AI to enhance their businesses and have prioritized it in their budgets for the coming year. But success with generative AI doesn’t happen overnight. Organizations must have a comprehensive data strategy, cloud infrastructure optimization, proactive cybersecurity measures, and a forward-thinking, customer-centric approach that encourages continuous experimentation and learning.
The full survey results, along with insights on strategy and an expert analysis of the findings, can be accessed here.
