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ABBYY Survey Shows Businesses Drawn to AI, but Trust Issues Remain

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A new survey from ABBYY, a provider of office-automation solutions, finds that fear of missing out (FOMO) plays a big factor in artificial intelligence (AI) investment among enterprises, with 63 percent of global IT leaders reporting they are worried their company will be left behind if they don’t use it.

With fears of being left behind so prevalent, ABBYY say it’s no surprise that IT decision makers from the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Singapore, and Australia reported that average investment in AI reached $650,000 in the last year despite a third (33 percent) of business leaders having concerns about implementation costs.

Almost all (96 percent) respondents in the ABBYY State of Intelligent Automation: AI Trust Barometer said they also plan to increase investment in AI in the next year, although Gartner predicts that by 2025, growth in 90 percent of enterprise deployments of GenAI will slow as costs exceed value.

Furthermore, over half (55 percent) of business leaders admitted that another key driver for use of AI was pressure from customers.

Surprisingly, the survey revealed another fear for IT leaders implementing AI was misuse by their own staff (35 percent). This came ahead of concerns about costs (33 percent), AI hallucinations, and lack of expertise (both 32 percent), and even compliance risk (29 percent). (AI hallucinations are when AI produces incorrect or misleading results.)

Overall, respondents reported an overwhelmingly high level of trust in AI tools (84 percent). The most trustworthy according to decision makers were small language models (SLMs) or purpose-built AI (90 percent). More than half (54 percent) said they were already using purpose-built AI tools, such as intelligent document processing (IDP).

Maxime Vermeir, senior director of AI Strategy at ABBYY, commented, “It’s no surprise to me that organizations have more trust in small language models due to the tendency of LLMs to hallucinate and provide inaccurate and possibly harmful outcomes. We’re seeing more business leaders moving to SLMs to better address their specific business needs, enabling more trustworthy results.”

When asked about trust and ethical use of AI, an overwhelming majority (91 percent) of respondents are confident their company is following all government regulations. Yet only 56 percent say they have their own trustworthy AI policies, while 43 percent are seeking guidance from a consultant or non-profit. Half (50 percent) said they would feel more confident knowing their company had a responsible AI policy, while having software tools that can detect and monitor AI compliance was also cited as a confidence booster (48 percent).

On a regional basis, levels of trust were highest among U.S. respondents, with 87 percent saying they trust AI, Singapore came next at 86 percent, followed by the U.K. and Australia, both 85 percent, and then Germany at 83 percent. Last was France, with just 77 percent of respondents indicating they trust AI.

The ABBYY State of Intelligent Automation Report gauged the level of trust and adoption of AI technologies across 1,200 IT decision makers in the UK, US, France, Germany, Australia and Singapore. The study was carried out June 3-12, 2024. Download the full report for additional details here.

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