Executive Summary

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been quietly weaving itself into our daily lives for years.

It’s baked into so many services that we often don’t even know we’re using it. At the UK’s recent AI Safety Summit, King Charles likened the development of AI as being "no less important than the discovery of electricity". Yet, the AI tools and algorithms that help to create these services have traditionally been the preserve of data scientists and computing engineers. Until now.

The emergence of new Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI tools, such as Google’s Bard AI and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, has levelled the playing field. LLMs use deep learning techniques and enormous data sets to understand, summarise, generate and predict new content.

As such, they are typically trained on datasets large enough to include nearly everything that has been written on the internet over a large span of time.

Today’s LLMs are at such a size that the predictive results and performance has reached a new level. This means they can be used by people everywhere to support many of the tasks we encounter on a daily basis. By enabling users to create prompts in natural language, without the need for code or advanced mathematics, these powerful AI capabilities are even more accessible.

And people have adopted it with gusto – using GenAI tools to write code, summarise complex documents, conduct research, create content, drive creativity, and more. The possibilities for enhancing

human capability and delivering productivity hacks at home and in the workplace have appeared almost limitless.

In this report, we discuss the findings, while providing analysis on some of the areas businesses should consider as they move forward with GenAI.

Methodology

The survey was conducted among 150 UK ITDMs, working in organisations with 500+ employees. The interviews were conducted online by Sapio Research using an email invitation and an online survey.

Executive Summary

But with great power comes great responsibility. Just as quickly as the technology has proliferated into the mainstream, new problems and challenges have emerged alongside it. From students using GenAI to draft essays, to employees exposing company data online. Now the genie has forced its way out of the bottle, we must consider how best to harness its power. Begging the question: are we really ready for it? Do we understand it? Can we control it? And to what extent do we need to understand and control it? As the use cases and influence of GenAI gains pace, we took a pulse check to understand organisational impact, how prepared people feel, and what the future may hold. Through an independent survey of 150 UK IT decision makers, we found that:

There is near-universal agreement that GenAI will have an impact on all organisations and industries – from government to financial services.

Great optimism and willingness to be open minded about the technology prevails, with many organisations having already taken steps to adopt it.

Concerns around jobs, skills and accuracy persist. Many businesses are perhaps underestimating the huge challenges scaling GenAI.