Artificial intelligence (AI) played a crucial role in the survival of many organizations during the Covid-19 pandemic, and its influence is only going to grow with time. Recognising the opportunity, businesses in the UK are at the forefront of adoption, compared to elsewhere in Europe.
According to a new report from Cognizant, based on a poll of 1,200 enterprise executives, almost a fifth (18 percent) of organizations in the country are already in the advanced stages of AI maturity. That puts them ahead of Germany (16 percent) and France (12 percent), the two closest competitors.
UK business leaders are also more inclined to believe AI will play a major role in the future of business, compared to organizations in the rest of Europe.
The importance of AI was highlighted during the Covid-19 pandemic, used to predict trends in real-time, personalize customer experiences and explore treatments and vaccines.
Despite certain limits (e.g. needing to be retrained during periods of dramatic change), businesses in Europe are expected to double their spending on the tech within the next three years.
Other major challenges are ensuring data quality, governance, security, integration and identifying trusted data. At the moment, businesses spend roughly a third of their AI budgets on data management, the report concluded.