ManageEngine, the enterprise IT management division of Zoho Corporation, announced results from its recent market study, The 2021 Digital Readiness Survey, finding that 86 per cent of organisations worldwide are using artificial intelligence (AI) more than they did two years ago. However, only 35 per cent of the global respondents reported that their confidence in the technology has significantly increased.
The focus of the study was to understand technological and process maturity in a post-COVID world, in areas such as remote work, security, business analytics and AI. ManageEngine commissioned Dimensional Research to conduct a survey of 1,210 qualified executives and technology professionals from small businesses to large enterprises. Researchers investigated geographical trends from North America, Australia and New Zealand, the United Kingdom, India and Singapore.
Organisations worldwide mainly increased their use of AI to improve business analytics (63 per cent), increase operational efficiency (62 per cent) and enhance the customer experience (60 per cent). While a majority of global respondents (94 per cent) believe that AI will meet business expectations — and 65 per cent stated AI had delivered measurable business results—some fears remain around the technology’s performance.
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Business Analytics is Key to Success
The growing use of AI coincides with a broader trend of using analytics to improve the use of available data and the speed and accuracy of decision-making. Profitability and competition, particularly in the post-pandemic era, are also driving organisations across the world to invest in business analytics platforms and capabilities.
Business analytics is an umbrella term for several types of analytics — descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive. Descriptive analytics interprets data simply, diagnostic analytics helps answer why something happened, predictive analytics makes forecasts and prescriptive analytics makes suggestions.
Predictive and prescriptive analytics, in particular, might help organisations more accurately forecast future trends and suggest potential courses of action to help avoid negative consequences from any future disruption on the scale of COVID-19.
The biggest user of business analytics by far is IT. An average of 63 per cent of IT departments worldwide cited this in the survey. In North America, however, 67 per cent of executives noted their use of business analytics, which was higher than their IT departments’ use (61 per cent). Business areas such as marketing, sales, human resources, operations and R&D are also showing interest in business analytics but are well behind IT and executives on adoption and actual use.
Other key findings of the survey:
- A mighty 96 per cent of organisations are planning to continue supporting remote workers for the next two years. Concerningly, the report also found that 84% of IT professionals believe that remote workers have increased their enterprise’s security risk.
- More than half (56 per cent) of respondents stated that improving their security infrastructure is a key driver of adopting new technologies.
- 78 per cent of organisations revealed that remote workers download software without obtaining approval from the IT department; this shadow IT mainly included mobile-specific applications (40 per cent), online meeting tools (38%) and document sharing solutions (31 per cent).
- 84 per cent of respondents use more cloud services now than they did before the pandemic began. However, most respondents believe that improved security (56%), performance (52 per cent) and reliability (51 per cent) would increase their company’s confidence in cloud-based solutions.
