AI Adoption Creeps as Enterprises Wrestle With Costs and Use Cases

Global enterprises are grappling with the complexities of AI adoption, according to hundreds of top industry executives at a recent private software conference hosted by UBS. While enthusiasm for AI remains high, the path from pilot projects to full-scale implementation is proving slower than anticipated, UBS reported in a note to clients.

Most companies expect meaningful AI deployments to begin in early 2025, with optimists eyeing late 2024 and pessimists looking to 2026. The delay stems from challenges in data preparation, concerns over cost, and the need to establish best practices.

UBS note adds:

We heard:
1. The data points from a private GPU cloud infrastructure provider were a very bullish readthrough to GPU demand, Microsoft’s AI infra capabilities and the ramp of enterprise/software demand for training and inference compute.
2. One F500 customer was at 1% Office Copilot roll-out, moving to perhaps 2% in a year as they a) fine-tune internal best practices and b) negotiate to get Microsoft much lower on price.
3. One private flagged “copilot chaos”, with customers having to choose between AI copilots from seemingly every tech firm (we wonder if this creates pricing pressure and/or an evaluation slowdown).
4. Popular use cases are AI apps for internal, domain-specific tasks (simple workflow automation).
5. Little evidence of AI resulting in customer headcount cuts, but headcount reduction with 3rd-party managed services providers and (India-based) SI firms.

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