AI is the talk of the town, but businesses are still not ready for it, survey shows
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Generative AI adoption rate for businesses is yet to match the hype around the technology, with data privacy, regulation, and IT infrastructure acting as major barriers to its widespread use, according to a recent survey.
The global survey of more than 300 business leaders by MIT Technology Review Insights and Australia-based telecoms company Telstra revealed only 9% of them were significantly using AI.
While most leaders were optimistic about AI’s potential and expected to widen its usage, currently even the early adopters of this technology have deployed it for limited business areas.
“There is a misconception about how easy it is to run mature, enterprise-ready, generative AI,” said Stela Solar, Inaugural Director at Australia’s National Artificial Intelligence Centre in the survey report.
Its adoption may require companies to “improve data quality and capability, privacy measures, AI skilling, and implement organization-wide safe and responsible AI governance,” he added
“There are surrounding elements like the app design, connection to data and business processes, corporate policies, and more that are still needed.”
Ambitions and headwinds
Most business leaders said they expect the number of business functions or general purposes for which generative AI will be deployed to more than double by 2024.
Early adopters in 2023 had mostly deployed the technology for automating repetitive, low-value tasks due to them requiring less human supervision, said Chris Levanes, head of South Asia marketing at Telstra.
As many as 85% of the respondents expect to use generative AI for these low-value tasks by 2024, with 77% expecting to implement it in customer service and 74% for strategic analysis.
Product innovation, supply chain logistics, and sales were other areas for potential deployment.
The report, which labeled these plans as high on “ambition and hubris,” mentioned several headwinds to a widespread rollout of generative AI next year, specifically IT resources and capabilities.
Fewer than 30% of the respondents ranked the IT attributes at their companies as conducive to a rapid adoption of generative AI, with those rolling out generative AI reposing even less confidence in their IT infrastructure to support the new technology.
Meanwhile, 56% of the respondents said their IT investment budgets, in general, were a limiting factor in rolling out generative AI.
As many as 77% of the respondents cited regulation, compliance, and data privacy as key barriers to rapid employment of generative AI — a leading concern for generative AI ecosystem since the technology burst into prominence at the end of 2022 following the release of Open AI’s popular ChatGPT.
The technology has since led to numerous lawsuits related to the copyrights of AI-generated materials. Major companies have also experienced sensitive information leaks and security issues owed to its usage.
Speaking to media at a launch of the MIT report in Singapore on Monday, Laurence Liew, director for AI innovation at AI Singapore, reiterated that addressing these risks will require laying out well-established governance structures and security protocols for AI models.
“Companies must ask, do we have the appropriate governance in place, and are our internal documents properly segmented or secure?” said Liew, noting that businesses will want to avoid having AI models that can be tricked into disclosing private information such as employees’ salaries.
The ability to address these risks also relies on companies implementing robust internal cybersecurity measures, according to the report, with a thin majority of respondents saying that their cybersecurity measures are “at best modestly capable” of supporting a generative AI rollout.
Other barriers to generative AI adoption according to the survey respondents included the lack of relevant generative AI skills. Companies are worried they don’t have the right talent internally, and about its unavailability in the market.
Disruptors versus the disrupted
Still, the survey reflected overall positive sentiments about the future role of generative AI in business. While six of 10 respondents expect generative AI to substantially disrupt their industry in the next five years, 78% see it as a competitive opportunity. About 8% see it as a threat.
While building generative AI solutions that can responsibly handle large datasets and contextualize them for business is extremely challenging, it will soon be well worth the investment, according to Geraldine Kor, managing director of South Asia and head of global enterprise at Telstra International.
“When implemented successfully, [generative AI] proficiency will be a game-changer for most organizations and will distinguish leaders from followers,” she said in a statement about the survey on Monday.
According to a report from McKinsey released last year, generative AI is expected to have its biggest impact on sales, marketing, consumer operations, software development, and R&D sectors, and could add an estimated $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy.
The Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, June 9, 2023.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.
Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.
The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.
The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.
Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.
Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.
With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.
CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.
“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”
CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.
“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”
‘Cave rapidly’
During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”
A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.
Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.
Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”
That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.
At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”
However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.
“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.
Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington.
Stephen Brashear | Getty Images
Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.
When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.
Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.
C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.
Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.
“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”
— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
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