IT leaders are less AI-ready than they were a year ago, says Cisco report

IT leaders are feeling great pressure to adopt AI, but most say they’re nowhere near ready as they lack the necessary infrastructure and technology.

Virtually all the businesses polled in Cisco’s AI Readiness Index reported increased urgency to deliver on AI, and 85% say they believe they have less than 18 months to act. Six in ten are feeling even more pressure, believing they have to deliver within 12 months.

However, they feel even less ready to adopt AI than they were last year, with only 13% saying they’re fully ready to capture AI’s potential – down from 14% a year ago.

There are plenty of reasons. The biggest is infrastructure readiness, with gaps in compute, data center network performance, and cybersecurity. Only 21% of organizations have the necessary GPUs to meet current and future AI demands, and just three in ten have the capabilities to protect data in AI models with end–to–end encryption, security audits, continuous monitoring, and instant threat response.

Meanwhile, companies report feeling less ready to manage data effectively for AI initiatives, compared with a year ago. While nearly a third say that they can adapt, deploy, and fully leverage AI technologies in terms of data, eight in ten report inconsistencies or shortcomings in the pre-processing and cleaning of data for AI projects – nearly as many as a year ago. Two-thirds say there’s room for improvement in tracking the origins of data.

Skills are also an issue, with only 31% of organizations claiming their talent is at a high state of readiness to fully leverage AI, and a quarter saying their organizations are under-resourced.

Meanwhile, respondents feel that governance has become more difficult and that boards have become less receptive to AI.

Despite this lack of enthusiasm – and lukewarm results from current AI projects – companies are doubling down on AI. Over the next five years, the survey respondents said they anticipated that roughly 30% of IT budgets will be dedicated to AI, nearly double what it is today.

And while almost half of companies say AI implementations across their top priorities have fallen short of expectations this year, 59% believe the impact of AI investments will surpass expectations after five years.

The report recommends investing in scalable, adaptive, and secure infrastructure, enhancing data management, integration, and governance, focusing on talent development and retention, and trying to foster a pro-AI organizational culture.

“Eventually there will be only two kinds of companies: those that are AI companies, and those that are irrelevant. AI is making us rethink power requirements, compute needs, high-performance connectivity inside and between data centers, data requirements, security, and more,” said Jeetu Patel, chief product officer at Cisco.

“Regardless of where they are on their AI journey, organizations need to be preparing existing data centers and cloud strategies for changing requirements, and have a plan for how to adopt AI, with agility and resilience, as strategies evolve.”