ETR's OCT24 State of Generative AI Survey

ETR recently published its October 2024 State of Generative AI reports, based on a survey of 1,775 enterprise tech leaders, including 417 IT decision makers from the Global 2000 and 282 from the Fortune 500.

Topics covered in the full report include:

1. Evaluation-to-Production Cycle, Use Cases, Conversion Rates, and Barriers to Production

2. Expected Annual Spend, ROI, and Benefits

3. Build vs. Buy, Willingness to Add Incremental Spend, Cloud-Based AI Trends

4. Select Vendor Landscape and IT End User Commentary

The full data set and report can be viewed on the ETR Research Platform, or if you are not yet a subscriber, you can request a free trial or a copy of the report. In the meantime, this article will provide some key takeaways from section one, the evaluation-to-production cycle.

ETR has conducted exclusive quarterly State of Gen AI surveys since early 2023. In this October 2024 iteration, we saw participation from more than 1770 IT decision makers, 417 of which represented the Global 2000 Index and also included more than half of the Fortune 500 organizations. Of the total respondents, 58% hail from Large organizations, and 42% came from SMB organizations. Furthermore, 76% held C-Suite or Director level titles.

Here we take a look at the data trends for generative AI use cases in evaluation. Back in April of 2023, when ETR first launched this State of Gen AI series, more than half of respondents stated they were NOT evaluating any Gen AI use cases at all. That number has plummeted to just 12% in our current survey iteration, which is remarkable in such a short amount of time. Across nearly 2,000 respondent organizations representing various industries and organzational sizes, 88% of them are already evaluating generative AI use cases.

Now, moving forward from evaluation to actual production, we see below that three-quarters of respondents who indicated that their organization has evaluated generative AI/LLM use cases are already leveraging the technology in a production environment; this rate has slowly but steadily grown from 65% twelve months ago.

However, it is interesting to note that the specific use cases most likely to make it into production are internal-facing and not client-facing. This group of use cases includes what many people would consider lower-level tasks such as Text and data summarization, Writing copy, and Collaboration improvement. The disparity between internal support and external customer-facing support is telling about exactly where the technology stands from a trust level today.

To summarize the first part of our four-part State of Generative AI report, the most recent data illustrates that the Gen AI conversion rate from evaluation to production stands at 75% in aggregate across all respondents, up sharply from 58% just 18 months ago. When looking at the specific use cases, text and data summarization, along with collaboration improvement, lead the use case conversions, while external customer-facing support is the laggard.

That's enough free data for today, but please utilize our free trial to access the entire ETR research platform, or you can request the full October 2024 State of Generative AI report using the sidebar form. The full report rounds out part 1 by presenting data on the most persistent barriers to converting Gen AI use cases from evaluation to production. In addition, part two of the full survey data set and report covers expected annual Generative AI-related spend both in terms of absolute dollars and growth rates, Gen AI ROI (or lack thereof), listed benefits of Gen AI implementation our respondents are realizing. Part three offers data and analysis on the build vs. buy debate, the willingness to add incremental spend for built-in Gen AI features in existing vendor relationships, as well as Cloud-based AI trends as discovered in our annual cloud drill down survey. Finally, we wrap up part four with a select look at the ML/AI vendor landscape. This report should not be missed.

Enterprise Technology Research (ETR) is a technology market research firm that leverages proprietary data from our targeted IT decision maker (ITDM) community to provide actionable insights about spending intentions and industry trends. Since 2010, we have worked diligently at achieving one goal: eliminating the need for opinions in enterprise research, which are often formed from incomplete, biased, and statistically insignificant data. Our community of ITDMs represents $1+ trillion in annual IT spend and is positioned to provide best-in-class customer/evaluator perspectives. ETR’s proprietary data and insights from this community empower institutional investors, technology companies, and ITDMs to navigate the complex enterprise technology landscape amid an expanding marketplace. Discover what ETR can do for you at www.etr.ai