The Index, which surveyed over 8,000 globalcompanies, was developed in response to the accelerating adoption of AI, agenerational shift that is impacting almost every area of business and dailylife. The report highlights companies’ preparedness to utilise and deploy AI,showcasing critical gaps across key business pillars and infrastructures thatpose serious risks for the near future.
The new research found that while AI adoptionhas been slowly progressing for decades, the advancements in Generative AI,coupled with public availability in the past year, are driving greaterattention to the challenges, changes and new possibilities posed by thetechnology. While 92% of respondents believed AI will have a significant impacton their business operations, it also raised new issues around data privacy andsecurity. The Index findings showed that companies experience the mostchallenges when it comes to leveraging AI alongside their data. In fact, 68%of respondents admitted that this is due to data existing in silos across theirorganisations.
However, there is also positive news. Findingsfrom the Index revealed that companies in Vietnam are taking many proactivemeasures to prepare for an AI-centric future. When it came to building AIstrategies, 99% of organisations already having a robust AI strategy in placeor are in the process of developing one. More than 87% of organisations areclassified as either Pacesetters or Chasers (fully/partially prepared), withonly 2% falling into the category of Laggards (not prepared). This indicated asignificant level of focus by C-Suite executives and IT leadership. This couldbe driven by the fact that almost all respondents said the urgency to deploy AItechnologies in their organisation has increased in the past six months, withIT infrastructure and cybersecurity reported as the top priority areas for AIdeployments.
“As companies rush to deploy AI solutions, theymust assess where investments are needed to ensure their infrastructure canbest support the demands of AI workloads,” said Liz Centoni, Executive VicePresident and General Manager, Applications and Chief Strategy Officer, Cisco.“Organisations also need to be able to observe with context how AI is beingused to ensure ROI, security, and especially responsibility.”
The new Cisco AI Readiness Index is based on adouble-blind survey of 8,161 private sector business and IT leaders across 30markets, conducted by an independent third-party surveying respondents fromcompanies with 500 or more employees. The Index assessed respondents’ AIreadiness across six key pillars: strategy, infrastructure, data, talent,governance, and culture.
Companies were examined on 49 different metricsacross these six pillars to determine a readiness score for each, as well as anoverall readiness score for the respondents’ organisation. Each indicator wasassigned an individual weightage based on its relative importance to achievingreadiness for the applicable pillar. Based on their overall score, Cisco hasidentified four groups at different levels of organisational readiness –Pacesetters (fully prepared), Chasers (moderately prepared), Followers (limitedpreparedness), and Laggards (unprepared)./.