Spending on artificial intelligence by companies active in the EMEA area will grow this year by 61% compared to 2023, with 97% of organizations ready to confirm that they have already started investments in generative AI to support strategies and processes or intend to do so. In fact, these two percentages are enough to give an idea of the attitude of companies on the Old Continent towards a technology that has now assumed the role of “transformative factor” (for processes, business models and professions) and that 40% of executives considers, self-evidently, a “factor for change”. The “CIO PlayBook 2024: It’s all About Smarter AI” research that IDC conducted on an international scale on behalf of Lenovo, interviewing around 600 decision-making figures (including IT and C-Suite managers) of organizations active in different vertical sectors, made the point on the state of adoption of artificial intelligence in the company and reiterated that all declinations of algorithm technologies, from generative to interpretive AI, will benefit (and in a homogeneous way) from a significant growth in budgets over the course of the year to get to machine learning.
The race to invest: Italy between Gen AI and spending on HPCs
The appreciation for artificial intelligence, we read in the note accompanying the report, varies from country to country and the French and Dutch CIOs prove to be the most inclined to consider AI a “game changing” technology (they think so beyond half of the sample interviewed), while the Chief Information Officers of Middle Eastern companies are currently the most cautious (only 30% are already working in this direction). Italy stands out for one fact in particular, and specifically for the highest percentage (equal to 68%, at the same level as the Netherlands) of companies that have already made investments in generative artificial intelligence, while Danish companies are the most inclined (in 64% of cases) to do so in the future. Our country, as confirmed to Sole24ore.com by the president of Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group division at EMEA level, Giovanni Di Filippo, is in fact among the most receptive to emerging technologies and is also the only one in the EMEA area to indicate AI at the top of the list of priorities when it comes to spending on technology. Driving the growth of the national market, explains Di Filippo, are above all the projects of universities and scientific research centers in the HPC (High Perfromance Computing) field, and therefore the calculation systems (CPU and GPU, which are worth around 50% of the budget) and IT infrastructure maintenance and management services underlying artificial intelligence applications. If we look at the numbers, the data collected by the Observatory of the Polytechnic University of Milan (which estimates AI’s turnover in 2023 at 760 million euros) corresponds to the IDC findings, projecting the value of investments for the year in progress, say over one billion, by virtue of an estimated growth of the order of 40%. And a good portion of this spending, as mentioned, will be allocated to the infrastructure component.
Manufacturing and financial service among the “hottest” sectors
The marked attention towards Gen AI applications aimed directly at end customers (and therefore sales & marketing and customer interaction services) and the awareness of having to modernize the IT resources that must support the work of the algorithms are, in general, the two main investment lines of the vertical sectors most attentive to exploiting the capabilities of artificial intelligence, namely financial services, retail, manufacturing (in particular automotive), telecommunications, Oil & Gas and Public Administration. The interest in AI therefore varies in relation to the different market segments even if the majority of the CIOs interviewed agreed in reiterating its potential. In any case, the fact that stands out is that companies in the manufacturing sector are among the most enthusiastic about the phenomenon (47% of the EMEA sample considers technology a “game changer”) while telcos appear to be much more “lukewarm”. (the percentage drops to 22%). On Gen AI, however, there is a good approach from public administrations, with 50% of entities moving in this direction, but the leading sectors in the adoption process are TLCs and the financial and insurance services sector.
How AI is implemented and the vision of CEOs and CIOs
According to the IDC report, companies in the EMEA area plan to implement AI strategies favoring the hybrid cloud (this happens in 48% of cases) or the private cloud (in 24%), while only 17% are convinced that the path the public cloud model is better. “Artificial intelligence applications in the corporate environment – Di Filippo specifies – are normally resident on premise (at the company’s servers, ed.) for reasons related to data sovereignty and security. Potentially all companies, even SMEs, can afford AI by embracing the cloud model, through the platforms of the various Microsoft, AWS or Google or by adopting hybrid solutions”. The vision of Lenovo, which made an additional one billion dollar investment official last August in terms of innovation linked to AI, is not surprisingly divided into three levels: Personal AI, Private AI and Public AI. The first concerns the personal device with the information resident locally (the notebook), the second is the on-premise implementation of the algorithm technology on the company’s servers and the third involves the use of cloud service providers. Also interesting, according to the Lenovo manager, is the different vision among company top management regarding AI. «CEOs want to get on the artificial intelligence train because they see the business opportunities, while CIOs have the burden of implementing it and ask for resources, talent, budget, skills. In any case, companies have fully understood the importance of this technology and are starting to invest massively, also thanks to the push exerted by Gen Z.”
How many Italian companies are ready for Gen AI?
The main technological challenge in riding the generative AI revolution, cited by 40% of the CIOs interviewed, is represented by the capacity limits of the data models necessary to run the algorithms, which can require large amounts of computing power. This is then followed (in 37% of cases) by fears relating to the potential improper use of technology and the possibility that it will provide incorrect information and equally felt are the search for a reliable data platform (item cited by 36% of interviewees) and the dependence on thirds (35%) for the development of Gen AI. But how many large Italian companies are really ready, from an IT infrastructure point of view, to “seriously” use generative AI using their own data as a source? When asked a specific question, Di Filippo admits the difficulty in being able to answer. However, there is an indicator that suggests the scenario: in the last quarter the orders processed by Lenovo’s ISG division for HPC solutions intended for AI reached 50% of the total business, in December 2023 this figure stood at 20%. % and four years ago it was 4%. «Numbers that tell us – concludes the manager – that investments are oriented towards artificial intelligence, and this trend is also reflected in Italy: AI will be the new priority of the entire organization and if the best approach to encourage its ‘adoption is top down and it is clear to everyone that the degree of adaptability to the use of this technology will make the difference.’
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2024-03-22 14:11:11