Riding the AI current: why leaders are letting it flow

Sponsored feature How central is AI to your existence? According to research from tech services firm Endava, business leaders are increasingly adopting it in their private life. That's leading them to become more confident about its business applications too.

Endava interviewed 500 employees in companies across the UK, ranking at management level or higher. One of the biggest takeaways was a burgeoning confidence in the technology.

In a perhaps surprising willingness to hand over responsibility, two thirds of business leaders would trust an entirely automated AI to make their lifestyle decisions for them. Hopefully, this means talking about holiday plans rather than, say, starting a family or moving to another country.

The same proportion believe that access to AI is just as fundamental to society as access to basic utilities such as electricity and water.

"The fact that 66 percent of business leaders say they use it in their private life is a positive sign. You get to see what the benefits are. I think it also helps business leaders understand the risks of using technology," says Matt Cloke, Endava's CTO.

The research, though, uncovered something of a paradox: while business leaders are happy to let AI make decisions for them in their private life, they're far less confident that they're introducing the right AI tools at work.

Adopting AI is respondents' number one business strategy, ahead of introducing other tech and upskilling the workforce. Yet nearly half reckon their   organization   isn't investing in the right AI technologies to drive meaningful business value.

Despite this, though, half of C-suite respondents expect their company to be at an advanced stage of its AI transformation in two years' time.

However, this confidence isn't mirrored at lower levels. Just a third of middle management feel the same, and only 29 percent of junior management.

Fear is likely driving this disparity. Workers are often told that AI will make them more efficient, but can't see how. Instead, more junior staff are often concerned that AI will replace rather than help them.

Walking the walk

The answer, says Cloke, is to make sure that senior executives are walking the walk themselves, while demonstrating how AI can actually make people's jobs easier.

"If your C-suite is committed to deploying an AI strategy, they have to model the behavior that they expect to see within their organization," he says. "Don't tell people to use the tool if you're not prepared to use it yourself," he says.

As a partner of OpenAI, Endava was an early adopter of ChatGPT Enterprise across the business, and created a cohort of trained 'champions' within the company. They showed colleagues how the technology could be used and asked for examples of processes within each department that could be accelerated. Then they recommended an AI tool or created a custom GPT that could help.

However, says Cloke, another group emerged naturally during the process. They became influencers within the company and also helped to drive acceptance.

"These were people that, once given the tool, came up with a way of using it in a way that no one really told them how to do," he says. "They were just naturally gifted at being able to use that particular technology to solve a problem, so what we've been doing is helping show what is possible because these 'AI heroes' have done it."

People are happy with the UK's AI stance

The UK is a leader in AI adoption, consistently ranking highly in terms of AI readiness. AI is most widely used in financial businesses such as wealth management and payments, but is consistently making its way into all sectors of the economy.

Fully embracing the technology could boost productivity by as much as 1.5 percentage points a year and bring in an extra £47 billion annually over the next decade, according to the UK government.

However, with the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicting datacenter energy demands will double by 2030 in its base case scenario, business leaders are concerned about the ability of UK infrastructure to cope with the increasing demands of AI.

"It is important that the UK can have access to datacenters and even a large language model which is independent of other providers , " said Cloke.

This is a worry shared by the government itself, which earlier this year announced plans to create dedicated AI Growth Zones to speed up the planning process for AI infrastructure. Most decision-makers believe that the government is doing all it can to drive AI in the UK, and six in ten believe that the UK leads the world in AI.

Calls for a governing body

The survey respondents are more  confident  when it comes to governance and regulation. Virtually all consider it important to have some sort of independent global organization or governing body in charge of creating common policy around AI. More than nine in ten want to see the UK government take the lead here.

An international governing body might sound like an impossible aim, but such a governance mechanism needn't involve specific regulations covering the way AI technologies are designed. It wouldn't need to be a global version of the EU's AI Act. Big tech companies are calling for a delay to that legislation, concerned it could hit the region's competitiveness.

There has been talk of such a governing body, with the UN last year producing a framework for global AI governance, Governing AI for Humanity.

It recommends the creation of an international scientific panel on AI, with dialog on best practices and common understandings on AI governance measures. It would include an AI standards exchange, a capacity development network, and a practical framework for AI training data governance and use. There would also be a global fund for AI.

"Regulation of nuclear power doesn't regulate its design. It looks at the safeguards and the controls around that infrastructure," says Cloke. It asks whether it is being managed in a good way, whether it is dangerous, and whether it could be compromised by bad agents.

"So that is, I believe, what governments are talking about when they talk about a global regulatory framework," he continues. "I don't believe that what people are looking at is a UN AI Act because I think people know that the world wouldn't sign up to it."

Getting ROI from AI

The good news is that nearly seven in ten respondents reckon their implementation of AI has already helped to increase their profits, with only 12 percent disagreeing.

Most, though, are concerned that if their organization fails to make significant progress with AI, it will be losing market share within two years. Almost a quarter think that could happen within just one year.

The most pervading issue is getting value for money from an AI investment. Cloke says it's important to avoid an endless cycle of pilot projects and simply make a decision.

"The emerging evidence (if you like, the Moore's law of large language models) is that their performance doubles every seven months," he says. That means the longer you delay making a decision around which AI you're going to use, the further ahead of you your AI-using peers will be.

"So if you do get stuck in that cycle of endless proofs of concept, all you're really doing is committing yourself to having an even harder job catching up with your peers when you do decide to start using AI technology," he continues.

Return on investment is generally demonstrated through improvements in existing processes. But this isn't always the full story. As well as improving the efficiency of existing tasks, AI can often bring totally new capabilities.

"By giving someone the ability to load a spreadsheet into an AI tool, all of a sudden, rather than having to learn the skills of pivot tables and database queries and everything else, they can now have a natural language conversation with an excel spreadsheet," says Cloke.

"Those were things that the person couldn't do beforehand. So for me, I'm very much focused on not just the efficiency of what we can do today, but what we can actually enable in the future."

Sponsored by Endava.