86% of executives have deployed AI to enhance revenue: Global TCS study

Companies realising that being 'AI mature is a marathon, not a sprint', it says

As many as 86 per cent of senior business executives have deployed artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance revenue streams or create new ones, said a report by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) on Wednesday.

As many as 69 per cent of businesses are more focused on using AI for innovation and increasing revenue than on improving productivity and optimising cost, said the 'TCS AI for Business Study'.

Executives are positive about the impact of AI, with 57 per cent reporting “excitement” or “optimism”.

As many as 45 per cent of respondents in the study expected up to half their employees will need to use generative AI (GenAI) tools to do their job in three years’ time and another 41 per cent think even a greater number will do so. Most (65 per cent) believe AI will improve capabilities, enabling people to focus on activities that require creativity and strategic thinking.

“2023 was a year of exuberance, with every enterprise experimenting with AI/GenAI use cases. We are now entering an era of wide-and-deep enterprise AI adoption. Enterprises, however, are realising that the path to production for AI solutions is not easy, and that building an AI-mature enterprise is a marathon, not a sprint,” said Harrick Vin, chief technology officer at TCS, India’s largest information technology (IT) services company in revenue and market capitalisation.

“Our AI study has confirmed this sentiment; it has also highlighted that enterprises feel underprepared to deploy AI solutions at scale as well as to manage the profound shifts in the roles of people and ways of working resulting from such deployments,” he said.

Business leaders, however, are less certain about the “path to transformation” in AI, said the report. Only 4 per cent use AI in a way that has transformed their business and 24 per cent have not even moved beyond the initial exploratory phase.

Barriers to business success include corporate IT infrastructures and customer expectation. Organisations acknowledge the need to move beyond existing metrics to measure the success of AI implementation, but 72 per cent say they don’t have the right metrics. The survey highlights the need for businesses to take a strategic approach to adopting and developing the right performance indicators to measure the technology’s impact.

“When calibrated for accuracy and harnessed responsibly, GenAI makes the computational power of the data, cloud, and AI come alive. Add in human ingenuity and organisations can create a new paradigm for the modern marketplace,” said Sivaraman Ganesan, head, AI.Cloud Business Unit, TCS.

The TCS Thought Leadership Institute surveyed nearly 1,300 chief executive officers and other senior executives with profit and loss responsibilities, across 12 industries and 24 countries. About half the companies had $1-5 billion in annual revenue and the other half had over five billion US dollars in revenue.

Some key findings

• Executives believe the impact of AI will be greater than or equal to that of the internet (54 per cent) and smartphones (59 per cent)
• Corporate functions with the most completed AI projects: Finance/comptroller (completion rate of 29 per cent); HR (completion rate of 28 per cent); Marketing (completion rate of 28 per cent) 
• 65 per cent of senior executives say their competitive advantage will still come from humans — with their creativity, intuition, and strategic thinking unleashed by AI's augment and assist capabilities
• 40 per cent of executives say that in the future they have a lot of changes to make to their business before they can take full advantage of AI
• Over half (55 per cent) said they were actively making changes right now to their business or operating models, or to their products and services, due to the potential benefits and risks of AI
• 81 per cent of executives highlight the need for global AI standards and regulations
• 93 per cent of executives surveyed in the United Kingdom & Ireland said they have AI projects aimed at growing revenue. Executives in other regions are equally enthusiastic with 89 per cent in North America, 88 per cent in APAC, 83 per cent in Continental Europe, and 80 per cent in Latin America
• Nearly two-thirds of BFSI (64 per cent) and manufacturing (63 per cent) industry executives surveyed say they are excited or optimistic about the impact of AI on businesses