At this point, it seems many people are starting to give up on the impact Generative AI was supposed to have. After all, haven’t we already fallen.
At this point, it seems many people are starting to give up on the impact Generative AI was supposed to have. After all, haven’t we already fallen into the dreaded “trough of disillusionment”? The tenor of media coverage, social media posts, and more has clearly shifted from giddy excitement to weary skepticism, driven by a fear of overhyping the technology.
But out in the real world, it’s clear that GenAI initiatives across businesses of all sizes and industries are actually just starting to shift into higher gear.
A new study by TECHnalysis Research emphasizes this point. “The Intelligent Path Forward: GenAI in the Enterprise” is based on a web survey of over 1,000 US-based IT decision makers across ten industries and both medium businesses (100-999 employees) and large enterprises (1,000+ employees).
The study results show that not only are investments in GenAI initiatives continuing, but companies are also finding new sources of funding to support these efforts. Over half of the survey respondents said they’re using funds outside traditional IT to help pay for these efforts – 31% from special budgets dedicated to GenAI, and another 22% from other corporate budgets or initiatives, such as business units.
Fig. 1
The results shown in Figure 1 above. It’s an amazing statistic that highlights how companies continue to be enthusiastic about their GenAI-related efforts (as well as how disconnected many short-term thinking pundits are from what’s really happening!).
In addition to their continued enthusiasm, companies are evolving their thinking about how and where GenAI deployments are taking place. Due to the need to use vast amounts of critical, often sensitive, data to train and fine-tune the models driving their GenAI applications, many organizations are interested in conducting more of this work within their own data centers or colocation facilities.
While cloud-based GenAI efforts continue to dominate and will likely remain the majority for some time, a remarkable 80% of respondents expressed some degree of interest in local deployments.
