There’s no doubt that generative AI has garnered a huge amount of attention in the past two years, but how much are businesses actually doing with it? That was the question posed by a recent study from Wharton, which aimed to understand just how companies are using the technology.
The researchers quizzed around 800 senior leaders, with the results suggesting there has been a significant shift in the way they’re both thinking about and applying AI in their organizations in recent months.
A seismic shift
The researchers explain that when they first conducted the survey, in 2023, just over a third of leaders said they were using AI on a weekly basis. That figure is barely recognizable today, with 72% saying they did so in 2024.
The study suggests that this transformation is largely due to a dampening of some of the negative perceptions around the technology, which emboldens leaders to explore how generative AI can truly transform their business.
“Greater experimentation has shifted sentiment, with more decision-makers feeling ‘pleased,’ ‘excited,’ and ‘optimistic,’ and less ‘amazed,’ ‘curious,’ and ‘skeptical,'” the researchers explain. “Negative perceptions are also softening slightly, as decision-makers see more promise in Gen AI’s ability to enhance jobs without replacing employees.”
Widespread deployment
Interestingly, the report also shows that AI is being deployed across the organization, with adoption even strong in departments, such as HR and marketing, that were traditionally slow to respond to its arrival.
The use cases for the technology are varied, with proposal writing and data analyses joined by fraud detection and financial forecasting as popular applications.
The researchers believe that the results show that there is a less polarized perspective on AI in industry today, with fewer people taking either utopian or dystopian perspectives. This allows leaders to adopt a more realistic stance on the technology’s capabilities and reduces any fears associated with its use.
This mindset enables leaders to take a more experimental approach to AI as they’re better able to acknowledge the technology’s true capabilities. For instance, leaders reported concerns about things like data privacy, bias, and accuracy, but these concerns aren’t preventing leaders from wanting to experiment.
“You should think of it as a tool, and tools are not intrinsically bad,” the researchers explain. “The danger is that you come to accept anything it says, and we need to build in systems to fact check.”
Rebuilding the organization
The findings underline the importance of rebuilding the organization with the capabilities of AI in mind. This brings to mind the famous article in the Harvard Business Review from Michael Hammer, which argued that the benefits of the digital age won’t come when we apply the new technology to existing processes, but rather when existing ways of working change to reflect the new capabilities of the technology.
It’s a finding supported by recent research from IESE Business School, in Spain, which found that there is a growing sign that investments in AI coincide with investment in management, as organizations realize that to get the best out of the technology they need to remodel their business.
“Our empirical analysis demonstrates that AI adoption significantly increases the demand for managers, as firms require more managerial oversight to integrate and manage AI systems alongside human teams,” the researchers explain. “Contrary to concerns that AI might reduce managerial needs, our results indicate that firms adopting AI tend to increase both the number and share of managerial positions.”
A positive future
The Wharton results suggest that leaders are broadly optimistic about the impact AI can have on the workplace, with a strong sense that the experimentation we’ve seen thus far will continue apace. What’s more, the generative AI space itself will also continue to evolve, with new capabilities being added on a regular basis to try and make the technology both more useable and practical.
“The key to successful adoption of Gen AI will be proper use cases that can scale, measurable ROI, as well as organizational structures and cultures that can adapt to the new technology,” the researchers explain.
It’s likely that the technology will never be completely free of biases or hallucinations, but there’s a growing sense that leaders are happy with where the technology is at and are willing to put effort into seeing how their organizations should change to capitalize on these capabilities.
“This is only the beginning,” the researchers conclude. “We think the big rewards are not going to come from doing things better; the big rewards are going to come from doing better things.”
