Are businesses doing more than dipping a toe in the water with AI?
A survey of 400 domestic small and medium enterprises (SMEs) has found that many are rapidly adopting artificial intelligence (AI) as part of their everyday operations, and that even more plan to do so in the near future.
As reported in TechCentral the survey, conducted by eir evo and supported by Microsoft, found that: “[M]ore than a third (35%) of SMEs have already adopted AI, with nearly half (48%) planning to implement it in the next 12 months”.
The numbers sound dramatic, particularly when you consider that according to the Central Statistics Office, in its Business in Ireland report, some 99.8 per cent of Irish businesses are SMEs. What is worth considering, however, is just what these SMEs are using, or planning to use, AI for.
In a way the striking AI figures are reminiscent of similarly impressive-sounding claims around the cloud, which, if you read the blizzard of reports uncritically, appears to just be how computing is done these days.
And yet, AWS chief executive Adam Selipsky recently said he estimates that 10-15% of the global computation workload is in the cloud. Now, Selipsky has an agenda of course: touting AWS’ potential for further growth. Nonetheless, his estimate does ring true, and anyone working in an enterprise of any size will know that what is used is typically a mish-mash of both software running on-premise and software running on someone else premises.
If this is the case, though, how can we account for the kinds of figures that we more typically read about? For instance, O’Reilly’s 2021 cloud adoption report said 90% of organisations it surveyed used the cloud.
2024’s report, meanwhile, claimed 175% growth in ‘cloud native’, which it says “suggests a widespread shift of companies towards developing primarily for the cloud as their main deployment platform”.
One answer is: it depends on whom you are talking to. The other answer, of course, is that ‘cloud’ encompasses software-as-a-service, and among that is Microsoft 365 AKA Office. Clearly, using a word processor is not the same as deploying custom containerised server applications on a cloud instance.
The comparison is even more apt when you consider that the simplest way for businesses to adopt AI is to use Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Copilot, which are already bundled with Microsoft software and services.
According to eir evo’s survey, SMEs believed that key areas where AI is expected to make an impact included customer service (32%), IT (27%), and sales (14%).
As it is unlikely that we will see robot salesmen hauling suitcases full of small kitchen appliances door-to-door or organising tupperware parties. The potential for reality becoming even more Dickian notwithstanding, it is likely, especially given the push by sales software supplier Salesforce, that ‘AI-augmented sales’ simply means providing sales staff with information while they interact with customers.
AI being deployed in IT could mean anything from its already commonplaces use in information security – which is hardly worthy of being deigned SMEs themselves adopting AI – to helping out on the helpdesk. In other words, customer service.
Indeed, customer service in general is an area where AI is likely to have an impact, for good or ill. But we should be wary of believing that this technology, indeed any technology, will do away with drudgery. No doubt the paperless office will arrive any day now…
Still, according to eir evo, 32% of respondents believe that AI could reduce administrative tasks by three to four hours a week, and this should be given a cautious welcome. While the gains afforded by information technology are, quite literally, never as significant as people imagine – particularly where bureaucracy is concerned as IT has a habit of creating more – it is undeniable that AI has already proved itself useful for mundane tasks such as handling invoices and synthesising notes.
At the back of my mind, though, I do worry that relying on the machines to do the boring work, and some of it truly is mind-numbing stuff, we are in danger of facilitating natural human laziness. As a labour issue this is fine: who wants to have a deadening job? But sometimes that cognitive load we want to avoid, the one we experience almost as a physical pain, is actually the learning process at work.
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