Artificial intelligence 'will be critical to firms' survival', survey suggests

08 Jun 2018

Artificial intelligence (AI) will be ‘critical’ to firms’ survival over the coming five years, a survey carried out by software firm SAP has suggested.

According to the survey, 90% of business leaders believe that AI will be critical to the survival of their business. It also revealed that a further 88% believe that they could use AI to make predictive judgements. SAP also found that many business leaders are keen to make use of so-called digital assistants within their business.

63% of executives think that using chatbots will be vital in the next five years, SAP found.

Of the 2,500 executives surveyed, 61% of business leaders believe that AI will transform existing jobs, and 31% think that it could replace jobs altogether. A further 74% believe that upskilling staff members will be a priority in the next three years.

Commenting on the matter, Alex Guillen, Market Manager at tech company Insight UK, said: ‘AI paves the way towards creating a next-generation workforce, where bots deal with the time-consuming repetitive tasks, offering organisations the chance to redeploy workers to more engaging and value-creating tasks.

‘But as business leaders increase adoption of complex AI, they’re going to look at how to configure the organisation to manage, monitor and support the bots – just like you would people.’