Sluggish AI adoption is depressingly reminiscent of past flops

The Yuan requests your support! Our content will now be available free of charge for all registered subscribers, consistent with our mission to make AI a human commons accessible to all. We are therefore requesting donations from our readers so we may continue bringing you insightful reportage of this awesome technology that is sweeping the world. Donate now

By Jeffrey Lee Funk | Jan 01, 2024

Image courtesy of and under license from Shutterstock.com

With all the furor about AI one would expect to see it in wide application, yet it is not, and, where it does deploy, mostly augments rather than replacing human workers. Former National University of Singapore Engineering and Technology Management Prof Jeffrey Lee Funk cites use cases.

SINGAPORE - A survey has found that the percentage of respondents saying their organizations had artificial intelligence (AI) projects in production was just 26 percent, the same as the year before. Equally disappointing, the percentage of those saying they were not currently using AI rose from 13 percent to 31 percent - implying a reduction of the percentage in the middle - i.e., those still evaluating and considering AI - to 43 percent from 61 percent.

If one goes back another year, the 2021 results were themselves surprisingly similar to 2020, per the recent annual survey of AI usage among organizations by California-based O’Reilly Media, the world’s largest AI survey provider. Has there really been this little change in the application of AI to solve enterprise problems?

This is not how the AI revolution was supposed to play out. Just a few years ago, many consulting firms forecast USD15 trillion in economic gains from AI by 2030. In 2016, Turing Award Winner Geoffrey Hinton said, “We should stop training radiologists now, it's just completely obvious that within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.” In 2020, even after it had become clear that his first prediction was obviously wrong, he said: “Deep learning is going to be able to do everything.”

So far, none of these grandiose predictions have come true. Instead, O’Reilly Media’s survey results appear closer to the truth. Forrester, another large consultancy, also reported that the AI market wa

The content herein is subject to copyright by The Yuan. All rights reserved. The content of the services is owned or licensed to The Yuan. Such content from The Yuan may be shared and reprinted but must clearly identify The Yuan as its original source. Content from a third-party copyright holder identified in the copyright notice contained in such third party’s content appearing in The Yuan must likewise be clearly labeled as such.